Dear listeners,
One of the great joys of being a pop music critic is being able to ingest an artist’s whole body of work, find the throughlines and themes and meaningful resonances, and then be a bullhorn, sharing them with the world. And perhaps the job’s greatest grimness is to do the very same, but in service of memorial.
That’s what I’ll be doing below, about the unfailingly and perspective-shiftingly great Brooklyn rapper Ka, who died this weekend, at a far-too-young 52.
Ka’s music was a frame of mind as much as a sound — beginning in the late 2000s, when he was in his mid-30s, he made rap music as if by ancient, tattered blueprint. His raw material was the hip-hop of the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, but he didn’t seek to faithfully remake it. Instead, he distilled it, burned off its excesses, and created a thing of extreme concentration, thick poetry and icy tone.
He was an inheritor of the woozily intricate narrative work of MF Doom, of the cocksure twistiness of his childhood friend Smoothe Da Hustler, and the more esoteric members of the Wu-Tang Clan, like GZA and Killah Priest.
Ka produced most of his own music, though words were always his primary concern. Sometimes, he went drumless, or something very close to it — a negative-space perversion that served to outline his words in hard chalk.
“They’re not for the radio, the club or the masses,” Ka wrote of his songs, in an early biographical statement on his website. “My music is for those who miss early ’90s hip-hop when pain and struggle were the dominant themes.”
Though he flirted with rapping as a teenager, and released music as part of a couple of groups, he was in truth a rapper who was born to be a veteran, not a rookie. So it made sense that he had to wait until midlife to make the music he was destined for, and for there to be an audience hungry and schooled enough to devour it.
Since 2007, when he recorded his first solo album and passed it out to friends, Ka released 11 full-length solo and collaborative albums — independently, and stubbornly so. That approach gave him a following that was modest but uncommonly devoted. With each album, he’d set up an in-person meet-up for fans to purchase physical copies, attracting long and patient lines.
Ka was, during the whole of his solo recording career, a New York City firefighter, eventually attaining the rank of captain, and was a first responder on 9/11.
He insisted that his two lives were separate — a job and a hobby, a responsibility and a love. But there was a shared honor between his two existences. On record, he moved with a purity of purpose, a minimum of fuss, a sense of something mighty and unknowable that any of us may one day be forced to contend with. In both of his roles, there was no time to mess around.
Lauded by critics and peers, Ka’s music didn’t break out much beyond his loyalists, and it wasn’t intended to. Indeed, listening to Ka felt like an act of protection. Here was a rapper making music so precious, so assiduously committed to its own rule book, that the proper response was respectful salute, and perhaps a whispered recommendation to someone else who might need to feel his pain. Too much sunshine might spoil it.
Ka’s music anticipated the cold-winter-street-corner revivalism of the Griselda collective, and he served as a clear inspiration for a younger generation of poetic ramblers like Mach-Hommy, Mike and Earl Sweatshirt, who memorably tweeted in all caps in 2015, “I don’t have the patience to sit on this website and explain to stupid people why Ka is the best, if you don’t understand why that’s your bad.” Hopefully the smattering of songs below will make it plain.
Grief is a pedigree we all share,
Jon
Listen along while you read.
1. Ka: “No Downtime”
One of the highlights of Ka’s exceptional second album, “Grief Pedigree” from 2012, is this matter-of-fact recollection of drug dealing anti-glory: “Hassled by the law but we adapted to the raw/In the city eating ’til the apple was a core.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. GZA featuring Ka: “Firehouse”
When Ka put out his first album, “Iron Works,” he did it mostly to prove that he could. A friend passed the album to GZA, the clinician of the Wu-Tang Clan, who gave Ka a showcase on his 2008 album, “Pro Tools.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Ka: “That Cold and Lonely”
The bass line that anchors this song — from the 2016 album “Honor Killed the Samurai” — is wobbly and powerful, durable enough to focus the ear, then it slithers away when Ka begins his incantations. “Wasn’t blessed to be resting in the ’burbs/I was stressing, wrestling with the scourge,” he raps, as if one of the benefits of growing up impoverished was the ability to name the pain precisely.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Ka: “You Know It’s About”
An uncharacteristically thick and layered production from “The Night’s Gambit,” released in 2013, this song finds Ka almost at war with the beat, matching every drum hit with a chilly declamation.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Dr. Yen Lo featuring Roc Marciano: “Day 81”
The 2015 album “Days With Dr. Yen Lo” by Dr. Yen Lo — the duo of Ka and the producer Preservation — has thematic nods to “The Manchurian Candidate.” But it also includes some of Ka’s most chilling imagery, about a New York so rough and tumble that not even pennies stuck in loafers were safe.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Roc Marciano featuring Ka: “Marksmen”
There were few rappers truly like Ka, but he found a peer in Roc Marciano, a fellow survivor of the early to mid-1990s New York rap underground, who also emerged in the late 2000s with a similarly hard-boiled approach to rapping. They became frequent collaborators, including on this track from Marciano’s 2017 album, “Rosebudd’s Revenge,” full of dour internal rhymes and tearless recollections of a childhood that never was.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Ka: “Borrowed Time”
Ka released his last album, “The Thief Next to Jesus,” just a few weeks ago — in part a concept record about how Christianity has failed Black Americans. But he never strayed far from the horrors of his own story, told with unmatched dexterity and restraint: “Had things taken that’s irreplaceable/Settled in peril, this kid never did what was safe to do/On wrong blocks, I saw long shots/Hope to make a few.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“Ka Made Rap on His Own Terms. Hear How in 7 Songs.” track list
Track 1: Ka, “No Downtime”
Track 2: GZA featuring Ka, “Firehouse”
Track 3: Ka, “That Cold and Lonely”
Track 4: Ka, “You Know It’s About”
Track 5: Dr. Yen Lo featuring Roc Marciano, “Day 81”
Track 6: Roc Marciano featuring Ka, “Marksmen”
Track 7: Ka, “Borrowed Time”
The post Ka Made Rap on His Own Terms. Hear How in 7 Songs. appeared first on New York Times.
