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Subject: "RIP KA" Previous topic | Next topic
justin_scott
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19944 posts
Mon Oct-14-24 05:11 PM

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"RIP KA"


          

Fuck. This feels like a David Bowie situation. He just had a Pop Up in NYC for his new album. This doesn’t feel real.

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Topic Outline
Subject Author Message Date ID
RE: RIP KA
Oct 14th 2024
1
RE: RIP KA
Oct 14th 2024
2
...Damn....
Oct 15th 2024
3
Pitchfork write up (swipe)
Oct 15th 2024
4
So young and in his artistic prime! RIP
Oct 15th 2024
5
Remembering Ka, the quiet sage of underground rap (swipe)
Oct 17th 2024
6
Heartbreaking
Oct 17th 2024
7
This one hit me on a pretty deep level.
Oct 18th 2024
8
RE: This one hit me on a pretty deep level.
Oct 19th 2024
10
well said
Oct 26th 2024
16
Rest in peace.
Oct 18th 2024
9
Greif Pedigree: Reflecting on rainy days through Ka (swipe)
Oct 21st 2024
11
Greif Pedigree: I hope they find Ka (swipe)
Oct 21st 2024
12
Interview from 2015
Oct 21st 2024
13
Interview from 2013
Oct 21st 2024
14
Ka gave all of himself at his pop-ups (swipe)
Oct 24th 2024
15
Okay, I'm just finding out he passed!
Nov 02nd 2024
17

spidey
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13260 posts
Mon Oct-14-24 05:15 PM

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1. "RE: RIP KA"
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

...horrible to hear...damn...

Integrity is the Cornerstone of Artistry...

  

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Original Juice
Member since Oct 03rd 2007
2598 posts
Mon Oct-14-24 11:38 PM

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2. "RE: RIP KA"
In response to Reply # 0


          

It's been fucking w/me since I saw the news this afternoon. I don't know him at all, nor do I pretend to be the biggest Ka superfan. I have supported some of his albums and I do highly appreciate his approach to his art, and by all accounts, he appears to have been a good man.

May he rest in peace.

  

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KnowNaim_X
Member since May 14th 2005
2535 posts
Tue Oct-15-24 06:34 AM

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3. "...Damn...."
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

Just went to his last pop-up and he remembered me from the previous one. He's probably the humblest musical artist I've ever met.

At last year's pop-up he went down the line and shook everyone's hand. He intently listened to what everyone had to say about his music and dude was shocked that I remembered him from Natural Elements.

He really appreciated seeing people return to this year's pop-up. He was happy with the turnout. I remember him saying that no one barely came to his first one.

"When I'm on the mic, a nigga throw down his blunt just to hear what we say...up in this bitch..."-Baatin

  

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A Love Supreme
Member since Nov 25th 2003
3078 posts
Tue Oct-15-24 01:48 PM

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4. "Pitchfork write up (swipe)"
In response to Reply # 0


          

Ka, Beloved Rapper of the Brooklyn Underground, Dies at 52

The proudly independent musician and New York firefighter released the final album of his lifetime, The Thief Next to Jesus, in August

By Nina Corcoran
October 14, 2024

Ka, the storied Brooklyn rapper and proudly independent musician born Kaseem Ryan, has died, according to a statement posted to his official social media channels. A hero of drumless beats, hushed vocals and an effortlessly wordy flow, he “died unexpectedly” this past Saturday (October 12) in New York. “We kindly ask that the privacy of Ka’s family and loved ones be respected as they grieve this incalculable loss,” the post reads. He was 52.

“Born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Ka lived a life of service—to his city, to his community, and to his music,” the statement continues. “As a 20-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department, he put his life on the line to protect his fellow citizens. Ka rose to the rank of FDNY captain and was a first responder on September 11, 2001 during the attacks on the World Trade Center. He leaves an extraordinary legacy as a recording artist, including eleven remarkable self-released solo albums.”

From his debut record with Natural Elements, in 1994, on through to his final solo album, August’s The Thief Next to Jesus, Ka carefully considered each word in his raps and the impact it could have on his local community. Seeing that through, he often hosted DIY events for his album releases where he would talk to fans one-on-one and celebrate bringing people together in person. Arguably most famously of all, Ka took great strides to remain independent wherever possible, from self-producing his work to shipping orders himself, never taking for granted that he landed a second life in music.

For Ka, hip-hop was love on first listen. As a six-year-old, he heard a rap song drift out of the radio and was immediately transfixed. “I knew as a child this was for me—I was chosen for it. It was my music,” he later told Impose. Though he witnessed hip-hop’s rise firsthand in his Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn, Ka didn’t rush through the songwriting process or learning how to hone his own unique flow. Instead, he took a pen to paper and, after a friend taught him to zoom out when writing, started focusing on crafting verses instead of just lines.

His first big break came with Natural Elements, the underground New York group led by Mr. VooDoo, L-Swift, and G-Blass. Ka was a natural fit as they carved out their place in the city’s independent rap scene, and they were quickly offered a development deal with Def Jam Recordings with some help from A&R talent scout Dante Ross. Four songs and one studio trip later, it fizzled out. Ka felt like the odd man out. In his own head and down on his verses, he left the group. Apart from a brief turn linking up with rapper Kev to form Nightbreed and dropping the 1998 indie rap 12" “2 Roads Out the Ghetto,” Ka started to retreat into the shadows for good.

A decade later, Ka found the motivation to give it another go, this time in the name of sharing his musical skills with friends and family. “I wanted to give my mother a CD to put in her hand. I just wanted to prove that I didn’t waste 20 years of mastering a craft without anything to show for it,” he told Complex. Ka dropped his solo debut, Iron Works, in 2008, and the project eventually found its way to GZA. Impressed with his steadfast lyrical flow, the Wu-Tang Clan member invited Ka to contribute to his then-upcoming album Pro Tools on the track “Firehouse.” Ka threw everything he had into his part, aware of the opportunity’s make-or-break potential. Next thing he knew, he was introduced to Roc Marciano, and the two became close friends and collaborators.

Over the next few years, Ka slowly became a local fixture–turned–nationally revered rapper with 2012’s Grief Pedigree and 2013’s The Night’s Gambit, both released on his own label, Iron Works. By the time Honor Killed the Samurai dropped in 2016, Ka was now lionized as a cult favorite by younger rappers like Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, both of whom considered his later-in-life ascent, especially his focus on craft over output, aspirational. Ka continued with a steady roll of albums that kept his tongue sharp and his peers on their toes: 2020’s Descendants of Cain, 2021’s A Martyr’s Reward, and 2022’s Languish Arts and Woeful Studies.

Ka also found time to collaborate with other artists. He did 2015’s Days With Dr. Yen Lo with Preservation, and 2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens with Animoss. He also collaborated with Navy Blue, Chuck Strangers, and, of course, Roc Marciano.

Though his comeback was heralded with accolades and high praise, Ka was most grateful for the renewed perspective on life it gave him. “I’ve been around way too much death and I know that living is better,” Ka once told Impose. “I appreciate being able to just go and take a walk in the park—the things I never did as a kid, like I never learned to fish, I never flew a kite as a kid. I bought a kite last year and went out with it to Prospect Park. I felt like a nerd, but it didn’t matter. I was hoping nobody knew me, but I was happy, man. I was in the park with a kite like a big kid. That’s living to me.”

Countless artists have paid tribute to Ka after learning of his death, including Westside Gunn, Chester Watson, Nicholas Craven, Curly Castro, L’Orange, Rome Streetz, Ankhlejohn, and Brainorchestra. “I always called him a living PROPHET because thats what he was to us,” the Alchemist wrote on X. “Me and Roc always said when KA rapped it was like he was delivering his words from the top of a mountain off a stone tablet. The truest man and artist I have ever been lucky enough to cross paths with. There is so much I want to say. It was an honor to call you a friend and comrade. Thanks Roc for connecting us. KA, you made all of us better. My condolences to the family. Rest easy Kaseem Ryan aka BROWNSVILLE KA. Till we meet again 🕊️.”

  

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A Love Supreme
Member since Nov 25th 2003
3078 posts
Tue Oct-15-24 01:49 PM

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5. "So young and in his artistic prime! RIP"
In response to Reply # 0


          

  

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A Love Supreme
Member since Nov 25th 2003
3078 posts
Thu Oct-17-24 08:11 AM

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6. "Remembering Ka, the quiet sage of underground rap (swipe)"
In response to Reply # 0


          

https://pitchfork.com/features/afterword/remembering-ka-the-quiet-sage-of-underground-rap/

Remembering Ka, the Quiet Sage of Underground Rap

The Brownsville rapper was a patient master of his craft, honing and refining his music until only its purest form remained.

By Paul A. Thompson
October 15, 2024

In December 2016, Ka posted a photo of a newspaper clipping to his Twitter account. It was a short item about the Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera, who, at the age of 101, had recently received her first solo exhibition at a major museum. In the 1940s and ’50s, she had begun to restrain herself, clarifying a minimal but dynamic approach to abstract expressionism—but, the paper lamented, was ignored by an art world too fixated on her “macho” contemporaries. Over nearly 70 years, working on a tier just above obscurity, Herrera seemed to strip from her work any element she deemed extraneous. “Patience, dear, patience,” she’s quoted as saying the day before her Whitney opening. The headline reads “VINDICATED.”

At the time, Ka was 44 years old, five albums into a career pivot that turned an also-ran from the crowded New York rap scene of the 1990s into one of the genre’s great auteurs. “For those that feel they don't get the recognition they deserve,” he wrote, “this may change your perspective.” Over the last decade and a half of his life, Ka, who passed away over the weekend at the age of 52, worked much like Herrera, refining his quiet yet forceful style until only what was truly essential remained. The final ten albums he released, from 2012’s scythelike Grief Pedigree through this summer’s The Thief Next to Jesus, represent one of the richest, most stylistically inventive catalogs in the history of hip-hop. Taken as a whole—or broken down into one of the simple couplets that are its component parts—they articulate a belief that falling short of your personal ethics is the purest form of cowardice.

Born Kaseem Ryan and raised in Brownsville—a neighborhood that he always called home and would figure largely into his work—Ka first carved a niche as a member of the group Natural Elements, and then one-half of the duo Nightbreed. But by the turn of the century, he had abandoned the pursuit of a music career and taken a job in New York City’s fire department, where he eventually became a captain and served as a first responder to the September 11 attacks. (The latter fact was pointed out in a pathetically sober obituary in the Post, which years earlier had smeared him for his “anti-cop lyrics.”)

By the mid-2000s, encouraged by his wife Mimi Valdés—the former editor of Vibe—Ka had begun writing and recording again, though this time simply for personal fulfillment. In 2008, he self-released an album called Iron Works, an embryonic version of what would be fully realized on Grief Pedigree. That same year, GZA tapped him to appear on his album Pro Tools. “Firehouse” is effectively a solo platform for Ka, with the headliner appearing only on the chorus. It’s an incredibly arresting performance. Ka sounds as if his vocal cords are being sawed through; his boast, in the opening ad-libs, that he’s representing “every block I ever lived on” is exhilarating for the way it simultaneously narrows the scope of his writing and heightens the stakes of its most seemingly minor conflicts.

The individual elements of Ka’s style would be familiar to a listener with even a cursory knowledge of rap. He wrote about power struggles in his neighborhood and about the sharpness of his own pen; he was fond of tidily straightforward wordplay, like saying that he was “at the bottom/That’s where all the tops is slung.” But these pieces were arranged in a way that made the familiar seem foreign; through his razorlike rasp, he could make a rote observation sound like conspiracy, harrowing details and sweeping indictments of character seldom rising above a whisper. Ka’s music, which is largely self-produced, is at once stark and enveloping, a fugue of dread and predatory housing law punctured by shards and wisdom and, occasionally, discrete moments of joy.

Over the course of the 2010s, Ka’s stature in rap’s underground grew steadily, from curiosity to cult hero to wizened elder. I’ll speak anecdotally here: I cannot think of another living rapper who was spoken about so reverently by his contemporaries. The admiration was universal and it was absolute. The fact that he continued to ship records himself (and even deliver some local packages by hand) was often cited as a sort of moral good. Maybe it was. But it always scanned to me less like performed humility and more like the inevitable extension of his worldview. His music was handmade, labored over, and ultimately physical in nature: as pared down as his syntax and instrumental arrangements often were, the songs gained their own internal rhythms, his meter implying momentum at the same pace as the story beats in the parables he loved. He was going to be above packing an envelope?

I return to Ka’s music seasonally. As soon as it feels cold in my neighborhood, I run through his catalog—sometimes sequentially, sometimes at random—and find myself lost in those crevices of Brownsville, of greater 1980s New York, of Ka’s psyche as he strove to live up to the maxims he first heard on the city’s stoops and in its subway cars. My favorite song of his is one of his most pointed: “$,” from Honor Killed the Samurai, which was released the same summer Carmen Herrera had her exhibition at the Whitney. “You telling stories that’s celebratory in times of war,” he raps. “With bars of greed, I plead: How many cars you need?/When fathers bleed to fill ribs of kids that hardly read.” These lines are delivered with venom, but the overwhelming feeling is not contempt—it’s disbelief. It was unthinkable to Ka that each moment of one’s life would not be in service of a whole, or that that whole would not be in service of one’s family and community. And the songs followed this logic, molting bit by bit, year over year, the changes barely perceptible in the moment, until a full evolution had occurred. He worked, monastically, toward an ideal, discarding from his art piece by piece until only the truth remained.

  

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stylez dainty
Member since Nov 22nd 2004
6751 posts
Thu Oct-17-24 10:17 AM

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7. "Heartbreaking"
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

He was special

----
I check for: Serengeti, Zeroh, Open Mike Eagle, Jeremiah Jae, Moka Only.

  

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stone_phalanges
Member since Mar 06th 2010
1837 posts
Fri Oct-18-24 03:02 PM

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8. "This one hit me on a pretty deep level."
In response to Reply # 0


  

          

First and foremost I'm a huge fan of this man's music. At times I've been a little miffed(confused?) by his lack of drums on his beats, or how his beats were aggressively sparse. Regardless of how jarring I found it at first I was always pulled in by his words and almost all of his albums grew to be absolute favorites of mine.

Beyond just the music though, this man's life as an artist...I don't have words for how much meaning I find in his journey. In one interview he described himself as a 'working artist' in that he held down a full time job for money and to support himself alongside doing his music. I do the same thing and often struggle with the role that my art has in my life. The clarity that he had in explaining how his approach to his profession empowered him to make HIS music HIS way was a revelation to me. It gave me the courage to accept myself and step away from seeing my art as a lesser version of what it should be because it isn't my main source of income.

I appreciate his drum-less beats so much more now because they represent his complete and total freedom as a musician. He didn't have to give a single solitary 'F' about if I wanted him to throw a "BOOM BAP, BA BOOM BOOM BAP" on his songs because he wasn't relying on my dollars to support himself(even though he still received my dollars) and I am so glad that that was the case. It would have been such a tragedy if his need to generate a specific amount of income from his music meant that it would need to exist in a different form.


Rest in peace brother, thank you for showing me a path.

www.anwarmorse.com
https://www.instagram.com/thereal_anwarmorse99/

  

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A Love Supreme
Member since Nov 25th 2003
3078 posts
Sat Oct-19-24 01:34 AM

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10. "RE: This one hit me on a pretty deep level."
In response to Reply # 8


          

I feel the same. His approach to his art/life is something that speaks to me as well. To live ones true purpose (whatever that might be) regardless if it generates an income is something that I aspire to. How he lived his life is truly beautiful. He shows us the way.

  

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DJR
Member since Jan 01st 2005
19159 posts
Sat Oct-26-24 09:54 AM

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16. "well said"
In response to Reply # 8


  

          

His story is incredible and he was one of a kind, for sure.

  

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Shaun Tha Don
Member since Nov 19th 2005
18314 posts
Fri Oct-18-24 03:55 PM

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9. "Rest in peace. "
In response to Reply # 0


          

Rest In Peace, Bad News Brown

  

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A Love Supreme
Member since Nov 25th 2003
3078 posts
Mon Oct-21-24 01:25 AM

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11. "Greif Pedigree: Reflecting on rainy days through Ka (swipe)"
In response to Reply # 0
Mon Oct-21-24 01:26 AM by A Love Supreme

          

https://www.passionweiss.com/2024/10/18/grief-pedigree-rip-ka/

Grief Pedigree: Reflecting On Rainy Days Through Ka

Julian Brimmers pays tribute to Ka and his deep discography after initially interviewing him for POW in 2015.
By Julian Brimmers October 18, 2024

Show your love of the game by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon so that we can keep churning out interviews with legendary producers, feature the best emerging rap talent in the game, and gift you the only worthwhile playlists left in this streaming hellscape.

I am writing this the day that Ka died.

The day that Ka died, I was cycling through the rain listening to his gospel album. I stopped on the sidewalk and sent the album link to a friend, who’s not so much into hip-hop but really likes billy woods.

At night, the rumor started to make the rounds in a friend’s group chat. Multiple people reached out to me to confirm. As if I knew anything. But people knew I had some sort of connection with Ka and a sometimes active channel of communication. On Reddit, screenshotted tweets by Marv Won and Griselda seemed to debunk it. But something was off.

He was “hard to reach by design,” as he rapped on Night’s Gambit, but somehow we’d fallen into a rhythm of catching up over periodic text messages. I wrote him “You good?” I didn’t receive an answer until the post went up on his Instagram, shortly followed by another from his wife, Mimi Valdés.

I didn’t know Ka, but we did meet three times across nine years, always at crucial moments in my life. And so his whole catalog became the single most important musical body of work in my adulthood. At least.

Like a lot of people, I first heard of Ka in 2012, when Grief Pedigree dropped. I was in a grim spot, and listening to his bodiless, anonymous voice layering up to speak the realest shit ever did something to me. In the beginning, he had more of a haunting presence, which evolved into a more well-meaning but authoritative narrative voice. His artistic journey through the decade of Ka was amazing to witness.

In 2015, when the early hype had grown into something resembling a solid underground career, I reached out to Ka while in New York. He agreed to do an interview and suggested we meet at the Brooklyn Museum. The day was cloudy and unbearably humid, because of some tropical storm closing in on the city. We tried to speak outside on the steps but quickly had to go inside for the AC. We did the interview in the lobby, surrounded by suffering Rodin sculptures. Jeff Weiss, who published the piece on this platform, titled it with a pull quote: “I’m inspired by pain.”

The conversation was candid and exhaustive. I could tell he still was perplexed by the idea that a chalk-white 20-something from Europe would have not only heard but examined his music. My former editor at Juice Magazin had told me how he had previously requested a promo CD from what he thought was Ka’s label. Ka responded himself, something along the lines of “sure, I can burn you a CD, where in the city are you?” “I’m… in Berlin?”

I was proud of the conversation Ka and I had, and of publishing it on one of my favorite platforms. The raw Q&A seemed to resonate with people and I was happy to have spoken to Ka in this particular period in his life. He finally seemed to fully embrace his artistic self, while gaining enough outside recognition to keep him going.

Now, narcissistic tendencies always play a role when projecting one’s own world and experiences onto someone’s art. And if you somehow find yourself in the vicinity of greatness—or: great catastrophe—one secretly tends to think “I played a role here!” I’m fully aware, and I swear none of this is why I’m writing this down. But I do viscerally remember the knot in my stomach when I learned about how the New York Post, less than a year after our interview, ran a cover story that showed Ka underneath the headline “Flamethrower! FDNY Captain moonlights as anti-cop rapper”. In this clear-as-day hit piece, in which the writer for whatever reason disclosed Ka’s salary and living situation, they were quoting directly from our POW interview. I know it probably didn’t make much of a difference, but I did feel a sense of guilt, having talked to him about his day job and artistic life.

Again, I’m projecting, but I do think that after this run in with the gutter press (NY Post, not me), he stopped talking for the most part. I tried throughout the years, and he always said no in the most friendly way. The art should speak for itself.

He did however make one truly great exception, in 2016, right after the Post fiasco. Some colleagues and I at Red Bull Music Academy tried hard to get him over to RBMA Montréal, to give an interview (“Lecture”) for the participants that would also be filmed. Chairman Jefferson Mao would conduct the talk. Ka declined more than once, until Jeff called him directly and convinced him. On the couch, he was visibly nervous but in good spirits, and the aspiring musicians around us clearly appreciated his stories of resilience and growing up in Brownsville during the crack era. Mimi sat a bit further on the same bench as I and you could tell it was an emotional moment for her to see her husband out of his comfort zone, but low-key enjoying the admiration of strangers. At one point, Ka broke down while listening to the voice of his deceased friend Kev on a Nightbreed track. The whole room helped make him feel comfortable in his emotions. At the very end, he got a standing ovation.

I’m not sure if he ever spoke publicly after that.

Through our early encounter and a bit of a maniacal habit of talking about his music to strangers, some artists I crossed paths with knew about my direct line to the Brownsville mystic. The first person to ask me for a link up for a potential feature was a seminal UK producer, who had become a legend in a different genre. It made sense. It would have been a perfect fit and may have introduced Ka, who himself had a musical interest that went way beyond hip-hop, to a new audience.

He was flattered, humbly thanked me for offering an intro. And then declined. He could only ever make music with people that he vibed with on the regular. In person. Fair enough.

The next person who asked me to introduce them was a West Coast rap prodigy, one of the most groundbreaking lyricists of his generation. It was the perfect request. Triple win for everyone, especially the listeners who likely would have loved to hear these two fan favorites interact, or maybe even jump on a track together. Their style would’ve matched perfectly. Again, same thing: Ka told me he’s a huge fan, but had to decline.

The hubris of thinking I could do something for a grown man, who is so well-connected, so revered as an artist—a fucking FDNY captain by day—it’s ridiculous. I stopped sending him requests like that. Instead I sat down with his music and learned, each time a little more and something a little different. Although I did still invite him to at least consider performing at a festival in the Netherlands, which I work with. You can guess by now how that went.

The day that Ka died, my friend called me up.

We had discovered his music together and we actually got to see Ka in the flesh in 2022, when he was rolling through Europe with Alchemist and Roc Marciano. It was meaningful to me to reconnect with him after six years, and I know it meant a lot to my friend as well. It’s weird how sometimes you just wanna shake a hand and say thank you. Someone dropped me a line that he thought he saw Brownsville Ka in the crowd the day before in Hamburg. I texted him, and indeed he had tagged along to finally see Europe and go on an extended digging trip with his friends. In Cologne’s venue we hung out at and chatted by the bar before and during Roc Marci’s set. Marci played tracks with Ka features on them, but Ka didn’t flinch when the few people who recognized him expected him to go up on stage. He still had to figure some things out in his life, before he could consider performing, he said.

But: it did feel like he might be really giving it some thought this time. He had grown a beard because he was now retired from his job. Maybe another decade of Ka performing his music in the same idiosyncratic way he recorded and released them in, playing unorthodox venues and finding a worthy live setting for his introspective music was ahead?

On the phone, my friend and I exchanged recollections of that night, and spoke about what his music meant to us.

After we hung up, I went through my text messages with Ka from about ten days before. We had been in contact about what would be his final album, The Thief Next to Jesus. Before the release, he had sent me the files and asked for feedback. We discussed the themes and the gospel angle a bit. I told him how much I loved the sparse “Collection Plate” and its powerful line in the hook.

It is tempting to think of an album full of gospel samples as him pulling a David Bowie trick. Speculations about his passing are inherently despicable, goes without saying. But from a fan perspective, there is a silent notion that wants to attribute some agency to him in his final days. If he knew what he was doing, he left us with a complex meditation on faith and Christianity, and a final track that consists of nothing but looped screaming. “Don’t go easy into that good night,” I guess. But do, by any means, rest easy.

It was raining, the day that Ka died.

  

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A Love Supreme
Member since Nov 25th 2003
3078 posts
Mon Oct-21-24 01:27 AM

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12. "Greif Pedigree: I hope they find Ka (swipe)"
In response to Reply # 0


          

https://www.passionweiss.com/2024/10/17/grief-pedigree-rip-ka-the-thief-next-to-jesus/

Grief Pedigree: I Hope They Find Ka

Jaap van der Doelen pays tribute to the late, great Ka – a writer virtually impossible to distill down to ten lines.
By Jaap van der Doelen October 17, 2024

Show your love of the game by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon so that we can keep churning out interviews with legendary producers, feature the best emerging rap talent in the game, and gift you the only worthwhile playlists left in this streaming hellscape.

There’s a special kind of magic to rapping fluidly around a vocal sample. On “Beautiful,” the second track on The Thief Next To Jesus, the excellent album Ka dropped earlier this year—and which sadly now serves as his swan song—the Brownsville rapper weaves around that titular word as if swimming through an Olympic pool of dread. As any album by Ka, Thief is meticulously crafted, at times so densely packed that it could be intimidating to the uninitiated.

Sometimes the road in needs to be a little shorter. Take “A Cure for the Common,” his collaboration with the producer Preservation from the latter’s 2020 album Eastern Medicine, Western Illness. Or rather, take the track’s razor-sharp opening, which runs just under a minute. Preservation created the album paying tribute to Hong Kong, a city he lived in for several years. His chop of a woman languorously singing “Ka…,” we find the rapper dropping stabs of supreme eloquence between its repetition.

There’s a line juxtaposing those who speak well of him with those who speak ill, hinting at how he plays with ideas of (dis)honor and (dis)loyalty on a Homeric scale. There are references to demons and divinity, showcasing his proclivity for invoking religious imagery in his poetry, and the way one can doubt and wrestle with all that entails. And there are boasts of how good a rapper he is, verbalized in a manner that immediately proves its point. All within ten perfect bars, and around fifty seconds time.

“Been conditioned to sound ill, but this is Brownsville” he caps it off, making the way the sample completes his full rap moniker—“Ka…”—a double entendre: you could easily read the line sans “Ka,” and understand the ‘this’ as referring to Brownsville, the environment that conditioned him. The “but,” however, implies a juxtaposition. That ties in with reading the line without ending the sentence at ‘Brownsville’. The man named Brownsville Ka might be conditioned by his surroundings, but perhaps he already had all this illness in him to begin with. By repeating the last part a couple times, we are nudged ever closer to that second reading.

It is impossible to distill a writer like Ka down to ten lines. But in the overture to “Cure,” he somehow manages to create a microcosm of his whole discography. And what a discography that is.

It is an unfortunate likelihood that Ka’s death will bring a lot more attention to his art than he found in life. What makes that somewhat easier to digest is that Ka himself already made peace with this years ago. “Van Gogh, he wasn’t revered, he cut his ear off and killed himself later on”, he told Julian Brimmers in a conversation for this very site almost a decade earlier. “That man wasn’t known until years after his death – he needed to have known what he was during the time he was alive.”

  

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13. "Interview from 2015"
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https://www.passionweiss.com/2015/12/08/space-is-everything-an-interview-with-ka/

“I’m Inspired By Pain” — An Interview with Ka

The Brownsville representative talks pain, gentrification, New York rap, The Manchurian candidate and much more.

By Julian Brimmers December 8, 2015

“Space is everything”, says Ka.

We’re sitting in the foyer of Brooklyn Museum, amidst noisy school kids, an arrangement of Rodin sculptures and a huge, wooden Mickey Mouse-meets-Spiegelman Maus plastic by BK artist KAWS. We were supposed to meet outside on the stairs of the building, but the days’ unbearable humidity forced us into the artificial AC-haven of the entrance hall.

New York climate is weird these days, but then again, maybe just weird for folks who have never lived in a place where catastrophic weather becomes a thing. Tropical Storm Joaquin has just been pronounced a full-blown hurricane and will hit the city any day now. Half of Brooklyn carries around broken umbrellas and clammy hoodies, so does Ka. “This shit is too muggy” – agreed.

Now in his early 40s, Kaseem Ryan has become a master of negative space. Everything that makes Ka’s take on East Coast lyricism so serenely spectacular has to do with what he leaves out: the words he doesn’t use, the pauses that he allows to let the beat breathe, the drum loops that are sometimes barely audible, sometimes not even there in the first place. The harrowing emptiness of the Brooklyn streets at night that are the real star of Ka’s youtube channel.

In a sense, it feels almost strange to encounter him as the humble, super-approachable interview partner that he is. In the gritty ambience of his four albums “Iron Works”, “Grief Pedigree”, “Night’s Gambit” and, most recently, “Days With Dr. Yen Lo” alongside producer/DJ Preservation, Ka rarely appears to be a real person. His voice hangs over the beat like an apparition, a growling narrative voice that is essentially bodiless.

He took his time to hone this specific style, more than 20 years to be exact. First as part of the Tommy Boy-signed 90s crew Natural Elements, later with Nightbreed. “Iron Works”, the slept on compilation of left overs that initiated his time as a critically acclaimed solo act, was supposed to be a farewell to music. Instead – with a little encouragement of GZA – it paved the way for one of the most unlikely comeback stories the New York underground has brought forth. With three back-to-back-to-back masterpieces to his name, it’s about time to catch up with the elusive MC. —Julian Brimmers

Julian: You don’t live in Brownsville anymore, right?

Ka: No, no more. I moved out of the ville and lived in a couple of areas in Bed-Stuy since. Bed-Stuy is big, a couple of blocks I named on some songs, like Lafayette, for example.

Julian: I just walked down Broadway to Myrtle Avenue yesterday. It’s crazy how the demographic on the streets changes so abruptly once you turn right into Bushwick.

Ka: Yeah, the lines are not even blurred, they are pretty drastic. It goes from bodegas to patisseries within two blocks.

Julian: How was that in Brownsville?

Ka: The block I grew up on is not gentrified yet. The whole New York is not what it was. That’s good, and that’s bad. It’s good that the kids are not living as dangerous as we used to live. It’s a safer place on a whole. It’s bad, to me, just because people that come here think New York is soft, is sweet now. That’s not the New York I grew up in. And I don’t want you to think it’s all like that here. There are million dollar homes now on blocks that I used to call the hood. So where are they pushing all the poor people to?

Julian: Well, where?

Ka: The areas that haven’t been gentrified yet are Brownsville and East New York. That’s just Brooklyn, packed and packed with impoverished people. Where are you gonna push them to next?

Julian: Did you have any mentors in Brownsville?

Ka: Smooth Tha Hustla lived around the corner from me. We were good friends, Smooth, Trigga {tha Gambler} and me. We played basketball together in 271 park. Smooth was great, he took me to his producer… who didn’t like me (laughs).

Julian: Would we know him?

Ka: Probably, it was D.R. Period. He just didn’t like my sound. But Smooth was great, they both were super talented. D.V. Alias Khrist, do you remember him? I don’t know what block he was on, but he used to hang around. Those were my friends and I was very proud when they made it. I was happy for them. They were the only known persons that I knew at the time, but of course I was aware that Masta Ace came from Brownsville, obviously M.O.P., Steele from Smif-n-Wessun, Sean Price…

Julian: How do you feel now he’s passed so untimely?

Ka: I miss Sean Price, he was just a really good dude. I met Sean later on, he was just a perfect gentleman. I miss what he was as a person, I miss what he was as an artist. I’m sure there were other dudes from the ville, but those were the ones that stuck out to me.

Julian: Someone affiliated with Sean tweeted shortly after he died that, if there is an independent rap artist you like, you should tell them now. Just because Sean wouldn’t have had any idea of how much he meant to people.

Ka: I don’t think that he knew his impact, no. The love that he got when he died, I would have loved him to have seen that. That’s with every artist, when they die there is a sudden influx of love. Show those persons love while they are alive! I speak to a lot of underground artist and people don’t know how close they are to quitting. Your favorite underground artist is probably on the verge of quitting right now. People don’t understand it, they take it for granted that he will make more music. Then all of the sudden he goes away and they’re like, ‘what happened to him’? On this underground level you have to comment those artists, because you know they’re not doing it for money. In a sense they’re the purest artists because they do it for the love of the craft. It’s a beautiful thing. And if you’re not getting the money, you’re not getting exposure, you’re not being played on the radio – you need that love on social media. You need all these intangible things that inspire you to say “I’ma do this for the listeners”. I wish fans did that a little more. It’s tough to be a not-acknowledged artist.

Julian: You seem to have a very devoted fan base, in Europe especially. Folks that get each release the day it is out…

Ka: Wow. I hope that’s because they feel a genuineness in it. It’s obviously for a more mature audience. You have to be a listener. You gotta be somewhat intellectual, I feel, not smart or anything but a little bit aware of what I’m talking about. There’s no star here, I don’t have no pixie dust on me, nothing. I’m just giving you exactly what I can give you, in the best way I possibly can. That’s it. Also, I don’t give a lot of stuff, I might take two years to do an album. But – I hope – you listen to the album for two years.

Julian: What might play into that: you make music that requires concentration. You can not listen to it while doing something else, except going for a walk maybe. Which is a unique listening experience these days.

Ka: It is more cerebral. If you’re listening half-heartedly, you gonna miss a lot of things. I don’t want you to sit down every time you listen to a Ka record. But if you want to really absorb what I’m saying, you may have to take some time. If you just like the song, the pacing of it, the melody, you can do other things on the side. But on the initial, if you wanna know what I’m talking about, you might wanna fall back and chill for a second. I’m inspired by pain, by heart-ache. It’s very moody. Not fake moody, I’m not trying to make you cry or sit and ponder. It’s just stuff that I feel and when I feel it, I happen to have a gift of writing down exactly how I feel. By doing that, I think people can feel it too, which is beautiful.

Julian: You’re in charge of everything you release. Is that more liberating or more of a burden?

Ka: It was a necessity at first. No one wanted to hear an MC my age talking about things that weren’t necessarily party-related. The sound of the times is more ‘turn up‘. I get it, right now we are more in a drug culture again, taking drugs as a means to be free and liberal. That is not really what I do. So on the one hand there is music and on the other there’s the music business. I’m into music. If you’re into the business side, you better cater to what these people wanna hear. Music, on the other hand, is forever. That’s my opinion. I wanna do music that you could pop in 100 years ago and 100 years from now and still get that feeling. So there was a necessity for me to do my own thing. There just was no label going to sign me. I had to figure out how much money I needed to record. How much to pay artists to do my album cover, how much do I need to mixdown an album. How much money do I need to make CDs and vinyl?

Julian: The press plant problem is a pretty big issue in the states, right?

Ka: It’s an issue, yes. Now that vinyl is the hot thing to do, it takes forever for a person like me. When record day comes all the major labels are doing re-releases of their stuff and I’m pushed back. They probably want a couple hundred dollars plus, I can’t afford that. But I’m happy I’m doing my music, even if I had to learn how to go to the post office and send boxes to Germany. What’s the rates for packaging, are my stockings right? I learned how to do it and I can do what I want. Nobody tells me to do an EDM remix. I don’t need an EDM remix.

Julian: Who does…

Ka: Some people do.

Julian: Funny that you mention shipping to Europe. I used to write for a German HipHop mag called Juice when “Grief Pedigree” came out. I believe our editor in-chief at the time wrote you an email asking for a promo copy and you couldn’t believe someone from Germany asked you to send a CD.

Ka: Yeah, I know Juice Mag. I get that a lot from College radios and such asking me to send them promo copies. Sometimes I’m trying to do that, especially for foundations or libraries – if they want the music, I will get them a CD. If they have the money they pay for it, if they don’t and they just ask nicely, I send them a copy.

Julian: Are you a sneaker head?
Ka: I used to be. I didn’t like how the culture changed, I wasn’t gonna wait in-line for sneakers. I feel like the kids gave the power to the companies. I used to go to sneaker stores and if the pair was a hundred dollars, I told the guy I had 85 and still get the sneaker. Then it flipped over, people had to wait in line for a week and you can’t even try it on, and you pay 200 $ for a 100$ shoe. I know what it used to be and I don’t wanna give the power to the companies like that. I wear sneakers that everyone can get now.

Julian: What record stores do you go to in New York?

Ka: I go to Academy in Brooklyn, that’s in Greenpoint on Oak Street/Franklin. They’ve got a good rotation, I pick up some gems every now and then. When I go to the city I maybe go to A-1. And every time I travel, I try and go to record stores.

Julian: You sold your last record in front of Other Music, right?

Ka: Yeah, it’s funny, I don’t really go digging at Other Music. You can, but it’s more like a modern store. I just wanna go to an old school record store with used records. But Other Music is definitely a store that supports me. I think they’re the only joint in the country that has all my stuff. That’s why I sold “Days With Dr. Yen Lo” in front of their shop.

Julian: How did that become a tradition?

Ka: It’s funny man. “Iron Works”, I didn’t sell that, I gave it away. The first traditional release was “Grief Pedigree”. I didn’t know how to get it to people, aside from mailing it. So I was like, what if I go on Twitter and tell people that I stand outside and people may come get it from me. Make a pop-up shop real quick. Not a lot of people came, a few did and I was very appreciative of them. Again, that was more a necessity and now it’s become more of a tradition. I like the fact that I get to connect with people, shake their hands… because people don’t see me, I don’t do shows, really…

Julian: Why is that actually?

Ka: It’s weird, it’s just… I just wanna make music. I would love to do shows but right now, I don’t know if people would come out. I’m not sure… Eventually, my plan is to have enough music out, so you can’t ignore me anymore. “Yo, he made ten amazing albums, what the fuck is going on. How come he is not on this festival.” I need people to be outraged .

Julian: And yet, you just played Pitchfork Festival.

Ka: Yeah, that was great. I was glad that Pitchfork showed me love. I didn’t expect it, because if you look at the line-up you had major names. You had FKA Twigs, you had St. Vincent, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick… I feel like someone threw me a bone. Somebody in there was like, “what about Ka”. I appreciate those people. If they’re rooting for me, I wanna give them music to root for.. It’s good to know that all the time I’m taking away from my family is appreciated. I’m doing this for them.

Julian: You’re saying you don’t do that much but you put out a major release every two years now. That’s quite prolific…

Ka: I mean, it was three records, “1200 BC” with Preservation was just an EP. “Iron Works” came out in 2007/2008. But that was supposed to be it. I was quitting, I was over. That was a collection of my whole life, just to give away to my friends. And then, you heard the story, GZA listened to the album and all that. Then I went back in and thought, okay, maybe I shouldn’t quit. I just wanted to make one whole album and came out with “Grief Pedigree” in February 2012. “Night’s Gambit” in June or July 2013. May 2015 it was “Days with Dr. Yen Lo”. That’s two years between three albums. We were working on the EP, while we were working on “Days With Dr. Yen Lo”. Preservation and I had been going over to his house for two years, working and working. The sessions that I wasn’t in that “Days with Dr. Yen Lo” pocket, that was “1200 BC.”

Julian: Interesting that both releases stem from the same sessions. The EP does have a different vibe.

Ka: Oh, totally different vibe. For Dr. Yen Lo I was in a certain zone, I knew what I wanted to do with that. We knew the sound we wanted, we knew the music we needed, the tone we had to have. The tone of “1200 BC” was kind of pre-determined through an EP that Preservation had released earlier.

Julian: Does it help you to work within some sort of framework? “Night’s Gambit”, for example…

Ka: … had the chess motive, yeah. The chess intro for “Peace, Akhi” I took that from The Wire. I also took something from the movie Fresh, and even from the recent Sherlock Holmes where they talked about chess. I was all over researching chess motives in movies. My father told me how to play chess when I was six. It was always in my life, playing in the park or at home. It’s a strong game, if it even is a game, I don’t know. Chess is something else . To give myself a direction like that is good, it is a form of discipline for me. These albums have to be fun for me, too, and if I put my own spin on something, it makes it fun for me to write. It’s good to have a little idea before I go in.

Julian: I liked the pun in the title. Much like sacrificing a figure on the board, you sacrifice your nights to create art. How do you juggle your private life and the creative process?

Ka: Oh God, I’m living two lives, man. I’m trying to be who I am in the day and then trying to feed my soul at night with being the artist that I want to be. I want to respect the culture and give back what it gave to me. The reason I’m alive right now is because of hip hop. You hear people say that sometimes and you’re like ‘ah, that’s bullshit’. That shit is real. It made me want to be a smarter person. It made me want to read, so I would write better rhymes. It was that important to me. It gave me drive, I wanted to be the best MC there ever was. Hip Hop don’t have a museum like this yet but if we have, I want to be a wing {laughs}. I want to be my own fucking room, the Ka chamber right here. “At the time he was doing it, there wasn’t a lot of light on it, but yo, we went back and checked it, that shit was incredible” – that’s what I want. Van Gogh, he wasn’t revered, he cut his ear off and killed himself later on. That man wasn’t known until years after his death – he needed to have known what he was during the time he was alive. I’m not planning on killing myself or anything .

Julian: Don’t you feel better now that there is some kind of attention compared to when you compiled “Iron Works”?

Ka: Oh, I do! I’ve said it in an interview before: the difference between one listener and no listener is a universe. There is a dope MC out there that you and me don’t know about. Trust, there is someone in his or her room, dying, ‘why does no one care about my shit’. When they get their one listener that loves him or her, it’s an awakening. You can breath. You become free.

Julian: Did you ever talk about the labels that turned “Grief Pedigree” down?

Ka: Nah, a couple of labels said no. I don’t want to put them on blast because, no matter. But I left the meetings feeling rejected. I listened to “Grief Pedigree” and thought, this is an incredible album, but maybe I’m biased and I don’t know. Luckily I have a great support system, my lady was like “so what, learn how to put it out yourself”. In my head that was not special. My old thinking was, if a label doesn’t put it out and legitimize it, it wasn’t worth it. I had to break that old way of thinking. I just had to give it to the people that needed to hear it. And that legitimizes it in the end.

Julian: The album format seems to play an important role for you. Is that part of an old way of thinking?

Ka: I know it hurts me that I’m not making songs. I have dope songs that no one will ever hear, because they didn’t make the album at the time. I do like some of those songs, but they don’t fit on nothing. iTunes made it that we are in a song-centric era. You listen to track 3, 7, and 9, and then you shuffle it. But I wanted to make albums since I was a kid. An album is not supposed to reach you at the first listen. Right now, we’re at an age where there’s Mona Lisa on the wall, you look at it for 30 seconds and go “I only like the eyes and the lips, take everything else away”. The tree in the back makes the fucking picture, you know I’m saying. You might not like track two, right now, but that shit fits on the sequence of the album. I’m trying to make beautiful albums.

Julian: Which used to happen all the time, you listened to songs so much that your favorites kept changing…

Ka: One Nas album that I really loved was the second one, “It Was Written”. I didn’t like the track “Suspect” at all, until month later, it was playing and I thought “This shit is incredible, what the fuck was wrong with me?” I giggle when it comes on now, like, how did I not like this song?

Julian: Exploring one concept per album seems even more important for “Days with Dr. Yen Lo”. At first I wasn’t sure if I liked the idea of you working with another producer on a full record. Just because the formula you’ve found on “Grief Pedigree” and “Night’s Gambit” seemed so specific. In a weird way, Yen Lo seems even more refined, even more Ka, maybe. How did you do that?

Ka: Because I did music with a friend. We acquired a friendship before we started doing music. The music that I do is very personal, so is his. Preservation is a brother now, a truly great friend of mine. If we never do another album I will still know him for the rest of my life. If you’re going to do an album with a person who is your friend it’s a different thing. It’s like playing basketball with someone you grew up with. I’m throwing the alley-oop, I know he’s gonna catch it. The chemistry made the album. He listened to what I did already, and he made it his business to put his spin on it. I was very open to it. Of course we had our back and forth but we narrowed it down to the songs that we found were a great representation of the two years that we worked together. We really made a group together. This is Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth,, this is – you know what – this is Gang Starr. We are one. Dr. Yen Lo is one and the album wouldn’t have got made without the second half.

Julian: You also shared responsibilities for once.

Ka: What was dope about it: I got to be just an MC. Whereas before, I used to put on so many hats for an album – producer, MC, as well as this and that – and this time I could just rap my fucking ass off. And I had a producer that was only making beats for me. Who has that in 2015? He’s a very stand-up dude. Every producer that knows they’re good wants to give out beats, want to get placement on this, placement on that – Pres don’t give a fuck . He don’t care, like I don’t care.

Julian: So who came up with the Yen Lo concept?

Ka: That was an idea I had from this book that I read years ago, “The Manchurian Candidate”. I always wanted to use that character, Dr. Yen Lo, he was very intriguing to me. And he only had a number of days to brainwash these people {laughs}. Most people have seen the movie. He had a couple of days with these soldiers, and he made them believe in the idea to make this one guy a hero so that he could become an assassin and could be placed in a certain position. The book was dope, but that character, man… I just never used it until now..

Julian: That’s a pretty far out concept for an album, he’s not even a lead character in the story…

Ka: No, he’s a side character but I knew I had to use him for something. And when Jean {Preservation} and I got together I explained to him what Yen Lo was about. We watched the movie together a bunch of times and all the song titles represent the day that the characters spend with the Doctor.

Julian: So there is a structure to the numeration? I couldn’t figure from the record…

Ka: This is a secret between me and Jean. It’s just something we wanted to do, maybe years from now we will tell what it is but we had a plan for this. Everyone is thinking, should I get them in order, are there meanings behind the numbers… can’t give everything away {laughs}.

Julian: Grief Pedigree and Night’s Gambit seem to be part of one cycle…

Ka: …one train of thought, definitely.

Julian: Is Yen Lo in a way a vehicle to free yourself from talking about your personal past?

Ka: I was able to talk about things a bit different. But I will always talk about the past because it has molded who I am, it made me think the way I think. “Days with Dr. Yen Lo” was more a call to the state of the art and what I feel the art is either lacking or what I might not approve of. “Grief Pedigree” was a young man hurting. That shit was real. “Night’s Gambit” was a look into my soul, more sophisticated I felt. “Grief…” was definitely raw, rage. “Night’s Gambit” was rage but more honed, more precise. Yen Lo felt like I was stepping back to tell you more about my ideas.

Julian: The video for “Day 912”, did you arrange those books in the first shot on purpose?

Ka: Oh yeah, the books are in the order that we wanted to show. Ralph Emerson, Baldwin, Iceberg Slim – from not hood to hood, we read everything {laughs}. The cover of the album is a page from the book, too. I feel like kids don’t read enough anymore, we don’t read enough. Growing up I wasn’t a strong reader. In class they want you to read and you’re kind of ashamed that you just don’t read that well. Again, because of hip hop I became interested in reading. Hip Hop made me want to read and be more intelligent, be a more well-rounded person. I hope some kids want to be dope MCs and they better fucking read .

Julian: The vocabulary you use is quite unusual. You also seem to enjoy the wordplay aspects of battle rap culture.

Ka: Battle culture nowadays is incredible, these cats are remarkable. The time they put in, the slickness of their performances, you have to respect that. That’s a part of the art form. When I put slick lines like that into mine, they still serve the song, but battling is an offshoot of the culture that is really exciting.

Julian: One thing that might be somewhat similar to a capella battle rap is the way that you work with dramatic pauses in your cadence. You have those in your beats as well.

Ka: Space is everything.

Julian: Let’s talk about “Peace, Akhi”, for example. That one is very gutsy in it’s reduction, musically it’s not more than one piano note, a bit of atmosphere and very quiet percussion.

Ka: It’s very minimal but it gives you… even I get goosebumps listening to “Peace, Akhi”. That’s one of my favorite songs from my own catalogue. “Vessel” is another one. It’s those special songs. I would throw “Day 777” in there as well. That’s that lane. Those overly lyrical dudes tend to flood the music with syllables, but you have to create space, time to breath.

Julian: That only works when you are very economic about your words.

Ka: Exactly, if it’s not needed, there is no reason to say it. I could sit down and write a verse with you right now – but it’s the editing that takes so much time. It can take me two month to finish a verse that took me two minutes to write. The other day I was talking to Roc Marc, we were joking about something: it took me two fucking days to write two lines. I knew it was a fire line but if I don’t say it right it might go over some heads. So I came back to it, came back to it for two days and now it’s perfect.

Julian: The piano note on “Peace Akhi” almost becomes an exclamation mark.

Ka: Yes, it hits where it needs to hit.

Julian: Was “Peace Akhi” an important step towards stripping it down even more on “Dr. Yen Lo”?

Ka: It gave a direction, yes. I wanted elements of this in my album. Jean is an incredible digger, his music library is crazy. We sat in his house and figured we needed the music to be even more stripped down. Let’s make this even more naked, like, I like this beat here but, can we take this bit away? It was a lot of that. The most incredible album hip hop has to date is “Illmatic”. That’s what I’m trying to reach for, I’m reaching for above that, if that is even possible. That is a beautiful album, no fat on it. Lean cuts.

Julian: I noticed you keep describing albums and music as “beautiful”. Is that the key characteristic you’re striving for?

Ka: I want “beautiful”. Not “dope”, or “fire”. Certain things are masculine, certain things are feminine – art may be feminine, even if it is really rough. When you look at how art is crafted, beautiful is the best way to describe it, so I want my art to be fucking beautiful. I want a rose that is beautiful and dangerous on the stem.

Julian: Another stylistic thing that you do is the way that you layer your vocals, your adlibs. It’s not just doubles on your verses, it almost feels like another narrative voice comes in at times.

Ka: I love the doubles. Take your favourite songs, do you ever find yourself saying the adlib track? That’s real. Listening to Lost Boyz, Freaky Tah – RIP – was a genius. His adlib tracks were fucking incredible, he was the song. Knowing his importance, he was a model of what adlibs need to be. I study this shit, he was a master. If you start to recite the adlibs that means I won .

Julian: One of the final lines on Yen Lo says “now destiny is one death for me, not a 1000″. Can you elaborate on that?

Ka: Have you ever heard the phrase “a coward dies a thousand deaths”? You’re so scared to do something that you die in that fear. I have no fear of the things that a lot of people are afraid of. I lived that live. The things that people are scared of because they may get hurt or even die, I don’t have those issues. That’s what that line meant for me. When I die, it will be the first and only time that I die. Although I never like to tell people exactly what to think of my music. This piece of art we’re looking at right now, I don’t have instructions for people how to look at it. You get from it what you get.

Julian: Does fear not affect your life anymore? Maintaining a normal daily routine can be scary enough.

Ka: Yeah, but I only fear God. There’s not a man I fear on this planet. I know what I did in my life and you can’t scare me with nothing.

Julian: At what age did that change for you?

Ka: From my teens to my early twenties I was a different person. I was uncivilized, a savage, now that I think about it. I put people first now, I wanna be a man of the world. I wanna be a noble person, help people. I wanna be beneficial and just a good human being. At that time I was not good at all. My mother was disappointed in me, shit like that. Now I want to give back to people who love me. I wanted to honor my friends that passed away, so their name lives forever.

Julian: It feels like there is a whole lot of purpose in what you do.

Ka: It’s love. It’s being a grown up. No one can tell me about being poor and hungry. I was poor, I was fucking hungry, I did anything to eat. But you can’t tell me that this is the path you want for your life. If it is you are not growing. I wanna be better. I wanna be a healthy person, wise, able to be beneficial to my nieces and nephews, my cousins, as well as to the stranger on the street. There is a reason I am here, I don’t know why. But I’m not supposed to be here, I know that. I had guns held to my face. There must be a reason I am alive as a 40 year old man right now. Maybe it is art and helping people through it. Until I find out it is gonna be this.

  

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A Love Supreme
Member since Nov 25th 2003
3078 posts
Mon Oct-21-24 09:09 AM

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14. "Interview from 2013"
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/ka-will-not-give-up-1/

Ka Will Not Give Up

By Todd Olmstead
September 11, 2013, 10:00am

You’d be forgiven for expecting Ka to want to make up for lost time. But for someone who is simultaneously an elder statesman in hip hop and a recent arrival, every move he makes—on record and in his career—is calculated and polished.

At 40, the Brooklyn rapper—birth name Kaseem Ryan—just put out his third solo album, The Night’s Gambit, in five years. That’s a productive string of work for anyone, but more impressive considering that those three albums constitute the entire body of his published solo work. As an artist, he’s obsessively deliberate—perhaps to a fault. Though he says he has scores of unpublished songs from the last two decades, don’t expect a torrent of recordings to flood the market. “I don’t put out mixtapes,” he says with a dismissive tone. “I’m trying to be the illest so I can’t afford a weak bar. I ponder and mull over these verses and songs too much to just give them away.”

It’s a paradox for the MC who sets an ambitious goal: immortality through his musical legacy. Despite that, he’s one of the most humble musicians I’ve ever spoken to. Both at the beginning and the end of our hour-long phone conversation, he thanked me and expressed gratitude that I would even consider talking to him. Though Gambit (which he self-produced and self-released) has received universally positive reviews, he’s still not convinced the demand is even there for him to play shows. “Nobody beatin’ down my door for no tours,” he says, not quite lamenting it, just stating fact.

He says he’s ready: To go on tour, but also to lay the groundwork for his legacy. His albums are slow burners. He knows his songs are unlikely to make it into radio rotation. He acknowledges that he isn’t a flashy MC. But given time—if you sit with his music the way he wants you to—he knows you’ll come around to recognize the skill and the artistry. Because Ka is an old school rapper, a storyteller who evokes a New York that’s still here, but has been pushed to the edges in Bloomberg’s tenure. He doesn’t shy away from the reality of Brownsville, his home neighborhood that serves as the centerpiece of much of his music. “It’s nowhere near what it was. But it’s not a nice place. I’m not a millionaire yet for me to repair it. That’s my job to do if I’m ever blessed enough.”

And much like his music career, he doesn’t expect anyone’s help.

“Until I get the money to fix it, then I don’t expect nobody else to fix it.”

Noisey: Are you satisfied with The Night’s Gambit now that the public has had it for a bit?

Ka: I’m ecstatic with it, man. Any time you put some art out, it’s always good to get some positive feedback, you know? Especially in this climate, you put something out and 15 minutes later there’s something new. I’m trying to make art the matters. I’m always working on new music. I haven’t performed the album yet; I’m just waiting to see like, if people even want to see me perform it. I don’t even know. I like the music to set in first. I don’t want to do a show the day after the album came out because nobody knows it. I know I don’t like those shows. I like to go to shows where I know the words. I’m giving it some time for it to settle in. The next stage is shows. Right now I’m working on some other projects that I’m invested in.

Any hints on those projects?

I like to keep ’em quiet. I’m not really like a hype dude, like “I got this joint coming, I got this joint coming.” It takes me a little time to work on these projects. I’ve been doing something for a little while but I want to make sure it’s right before every body knows.

You’re basically doing it all at this point, correct?

I do it all, man. I’m the record label, I’m the only artist, I’m the distributor, I’m the video guy. I’m everything, man. But it’s out of necessity. I wouldn’t be talking to you now had brought in someone else. I went to a couple labels with Grief Pedigree and they all told me no, like “We’ll pass.” I kinda started bugging, because I’m like, “I think I got something dope here!” It kinda fucked me up when they just passed on me. It might have been the age thing. I don’t know if they even listened to the music. Like, they looked at the marketability, like, ain’t nobody fucking with him. I always thought hip hop was one of those genres where they didn’t care about your looks. It’s all about the music. It was a little bit of a wake up call, but I knew I had something dope with this album. I knew because I heard it myself, like, shit is a hard album. It forced my hand to figure out. How do I get my shit on iTunes? How do I make vinyl? How do I distribute this shit? How do I get it in stores? It was good. I’m glad everybody told me no. It made me a stronger artist.

Are you still relying on a job as well as doing music?

I have a full-time job. The music is a hobby.

I’ve read that you’re a firefighter.

People say it, I haven’t ever spoken about my job, and I try to keep it about music. I let people think what they want to think. I do have a job, and it pays for the freedom I have with my art. I’m so lucky.

Do your coworkers know what you do on the side?

It’s funny, I never spoke of it, but with Grief it was kind of hard to hide. A couple of the cats was into hip hop. I thought I was going to be able to hide because I thought they was, like, radio listeners. And I know I don’t play on the radio. But lo and behold, some of them have satellite radio and I was getting a little run on satellite radio so one of them was like, “Yo that sounds like Ka.” And he went a researched it, saw a couple videos, that’s how I was exposed at work. But they respect what I do. A couple of them do know.

I never think of it like that. I’ve been doing music since I was, before teenage. I was rhyming since I was a kid, like 8 years old. The music is the most important thing to me because it’s been my passion since I was a kid. You know, a job is a job. That’s what I do to eat. I don’t make music that I can afford to eat off. It’s just what it is. I didn’t come in in the ’90s where the art form that I’m doing could quite possibly have gotten me gold plaques, platinum plaques. I came in in a time where what I do is pretty much a niche market. It’s just always for the select few. That’s what it is. I have to work to do music that I love. If the two ever meet, the two meet. But I’ll be retiring, I’m fortunate enough that I can retire soon and I can continue to do the music. Maybe the two will never meet. My job will end some day, but the music will not.

How did you finally decide to put out Iron Works ?

I had done plenty albums. I was doing music forever, I’ve never stopped doing music. If somebody was to get my computer, they’d see a catalog of Ka that’s like, “What the fuck is this?” Thousands of fucking songs. I wanted to quit. I wanted to stop because I felt like I was getting too old. I got caught up in the like, “Yo, you’re too old to rap.” I started to feel like ashamed of the fact that I still rhymed. Like, your time has passed. I’m a realist. But I also felt bad that I had nothing physical to give to my people that I’ve taken so much time away from doing the art. So I was like, “I’m gonna put this album together and do this just for them.” And I’m gonna give it to everybody that I love and tell them, “Thank you for being such a good friend to me and I’m sorry I took so much time away from you.” So I did the album—I put my heart into it and I printed up a thousand CDs and I gave it to everybody that I love and everybody that I knew and their associates and all that. That was supposed to be it. I did that album with the intention of getting it over. I’m gonna stop this rap shit and I’m gonna just go be a pedestrian. It just so happened that it wasn’t the end. It was actually the beginning.

That’s when GZA called you.

A friend of mine gave GZA the album. And this is crazy because he gets music all the time. And for 20 years, it’s like, “Yo I’m dope, I’m dope, I’m dope.” And someone gave him the CD not even like, “Yo I’m dope,” but like, “Yo my friend is dope. You should listen to him.” And he listened. And by the grace of God he really listened. And he came back reporting to my friend, he was like, “Yo. Tell your friend that he’s ill.” And that was enough for me. You know I’m saying? GZA—one of the most lyrical dudes in the history of the art form—said that I was ill. I was like, I’m aight. I’m recognized in my art form by a fellow artist. I’m ready to die now. It wasn’t just that, he said he wanted to do a track with me. And he called me and brought me to the studio and we did “Firehouse.” It was dope. It was emotional for me because I’ve been doing this for a long time without anyone paying attention to me, so I really felt like I could do something. Like, you’re a writer, right? You been writing and writing and writing and no one ever reads none of your pieces. That shit’ll fucking destroy you. So that’s where I was at, just at the point where I was really like in the turmoil and it was really good to have someone listen to what I was doing on a grander scale. And they could’ve hated it! I didn’t give a fuck if everybody said they hated it. They had to listen to it in order to hate it.


That wound up being more than just a guest verse. You got a feature spot on that track.

When I went to the studio he had a beat for me. Like “I been listening to you and I got a beat that I think you will really dig.” And he played that track, which Roc Marciano did by the way. And he played that track and I was like, Yo, this is for real. Like, this is right up my alley. And I went into the booth and I had a verse ready. And I spit that verse down and he looked at me and pressed the button to speak and said, “Do you have more?” And I was like, “Yeah, like twenty years of more.” And he was just like, “Yo, do your thing.” So he let me shine on the whole song. And that was big because I knew the history of GZA. He did this for Killah Priest on Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. And Killah Priest is a phenomenal MC! So the fact that he put me in the same kind of classification that he thought I was good enough to give a whole song on his project, it was an honor. A crazy honor.

Do you think you’ll work with him again?

We never done music together since that, he’s busy. Wu-Tang—they schedule is crazy. So I try to stay out of his hair. What I do like to do, I just like to give him all of my projects. As a thank you, like this is what you did for me and for the art, and allowing me to speak. So every time I put a new project out I make sure I hit him. I did see him one time at a show and I didn’t think he’d remember me or anything, I just wanted to give him a pound and a hug on some thank you shit, and he remembered me like “Yo what up Ka!” And it just felt good that it wasn’t just a song. He’s a good dude, man. A real good dude.

Is it weird for you to be coming up at your age? Do you even think of yourself as “coming up”?

You are right. Coming up. You didn’t know me in the early 2000s. You’re aware of me now in the 2010’s. It is kinda bittersweet. I really wanted it when I was younger. I thought I was gonna be an MC and I was gonna make a lot of money and be able to buy nice houses for my moms and shit, get my people out the hood. I had these grandiose dreams of saving everybody, just what I saw, hip-hop was making so much money. But that didn’t happen. I felt like I let people down. At 40—I wanted it at 20 but I really needed it now. Because it would have been like I did something for so long and had absolutely nothing. I’ve been honing a skill and a craft. I have a room full of books of rhymes, hard drives now that if I’d never been able to share, I’d have been a grumpy old fucking man. I didn’t get the monetary success that I thought when I was in my teens and my 20s, like, yo I’m bout to get paid. But I love it now because I’m being really true to the art form that I love, that helped make me who I am.


Do you think it’s more meaningful to you now than it would have been back then?

Now being the person that I am, I appreciate it more. I ain’t famous. Let’s not get it fucked up. People do love the art that I do. At 20, I might have been disappointed that, you know, nobody know me. Now, I know that when they talk about the greatest of all time and they don’t mention me, or they talk about the illest verses of the year or they talk about the best songs, best albums of the year and I’m not mentioned, it don’t bother me because I know that the people that know my music, I’m in their mentions. Anybody who has my albums that really, really fucks with me speaks highly of it. And that’s great. I’m not on a mass scale. You ask a kid who the illest MC is, they might not know Ka. You give that kid my CD, though, and you tell him to sit with it, I think he’ll come back in a couple months and I might be on that list.

Do you keep up with the latest in the scene?

I try to. But there’s so many artists now, I can’t keep abreast like I used to when I was young. When I do my project I kind of shut everything down. I go through phases when I don’t hear anybody, and then I finish a project like, I’m trying to catch up and listen. I try to stay aware. I might walk past an MC and not know that they’re poppin’. But I know.

What are your thoughts on the underground versus commercial worlds of hip-hop?

A lot of underground MCs only fuck with the underground. I’m not on it like that. I just love hip-hop. I know what commercial is, and I can appreciate commercial for what it is, but I also appreciate the underground. From the whole gamut, I like anybody who does it from the heart and does it well.

It seems like people are more willing to listen to both of those things these days.

If you can’t appreciate what Drake does, can you really say that you’re into hip-hop? He wants to be a big rapper. But if all you listen to Drake and you don’t know MF Doom, do you really like hip-hop? That’s the test of if you really love the art. If you just listen to the radio and you expect them to feed you what hip hop really is, then you’re sheep. You’re one of the masses. If you love something you want to find everything else about it. Part of the search is finding out all aspects of the art form.

What about women in rap?

It’s male-dominated, I know. I thought MC Lyte was crazy when I was growing up. I thought she was one of the illest. Man or woman. She was just ill. What hurts the women’s scene is the sexuality—not the art, but how the companies feel they need to package the woman. That hurts the artistry. In order for them to be on a commercial level they have to be sexual. They gotta show cleavage, they gotta shake the ass. All of the more popular female MCs from the Lil Kims, the Foxys and now the Nicki Minajs, they have to have a certain sex appeal. The ones that we thought was ill—the Lady of Rages, the Lauryn Hills—they was dope. I don’t know if they came in 2013 if they would survive. Like that girl Rapsody—that girl can rap. I don’t think she’ll ever be looked upon as commercial. Not because she can’t do commercial stuff, but because she wears Jordans and a hoodie. She just worries about being a good MC. A guy, you don’t have to be sexy in order to be a star and shit. But women have to show a certain sex appeal. It’s unfair. It’s really wack.

What will it take for that to change?

We need the right person. I remember when white MCs was not that. At the time, I didn’t think that shit was ever gonna change. They been around since the beginning. I remember Beastie Boys, and they was just like Beastie Boys was an anomaly, like they wasn’t even real. For years, if you were a white MC rhyming, it became a punchline. Until Everlast. Everyone thinks Eminem, but it was Everlast’s “Jump Around” that everyone was like, “Oh wait, hold on.” They doin’ it raw, they respect it. It paved the way for Eminem to come around and be not laughed at. Now it’s like color is not even seen. Hopefully gender won’t be seen soon neither. I want this shit just to thrive, because there was a time that I thought this shit was dying and that scared the shit out of me. The sentiment was like hip-hop is dead, and I was like I can’t understand how this is. This art form is too powerful.

When did you think that hip-hop was dying?

It was when the radio that I was listening to started sounding all the same. I was never used to radio sounding like that. That’s when I finally realized that we had no control of the art anymore. We meaning the block. I’m from a time where we determined what was dope on the radio. I was the kid who went to the DJ at the block party like, “Yo. Put that ‘La Di Da Di’ on! Play that Sucka MCs!” I’m the one who told them to play that shit. And if you play that stuff enough, now it’s a jam and then the jam came on the radio. It was never the other way around. The song started on the block and then got to the radio. Now the song starts on the radio and then goes to the block. That was the big transition. Instead of the kid telling what’s dope, the kid was being told what’s dope. That was a big loss for the music. Radio programming is real. You play a song you hate over and over and over and over, you’ll find something you like. All of a sudden that melody will stick. That is the magic of music. That’s what they did on the radio. That’s when I thought it was dying. All of a sudden it was the same theme—I’m rich, you know, I got the flyest shit. And that was the only game that was on the radio. There was no Native Tongue equivalent. There was no conscious rap equivalent. It was nothing, only just that.

I want to ask you about New York. How have you seen the changes in Brownsville?

There’s no CitiBikes in Brownsville yet. It’s not as bad as when I was growing up and shit. It’s nowhere near what it was. But it’s not a nice place. I’m not a millionaire yet for me to repair it. That’s my job to do if I’m ever blessed enough. I know what the ‘Ville needs, but I don’t have the resources to do that yet. It’s not gentrified like Williamsburg or Bed-Stuy or Harlem. It’s still far out from the city. The projects are there. That’s the most concentrated area of projects in the city. It’s not even just the projects. It’s a hard area. The shit you see over there just raises you. It made me a man. Official real issues. Not no bullshit. It’s not where it should be. Still abandoned buildings. Still potholes in the street. Until I get the money to fix it then I don’t expect nobody else to fix it.

Do you feel like it’s your responsibility to document that area of New York?

That area of New York is overlooked. We have so many people that are not from New York now. They walk the streets oblivious to what New York is and was. They’re surprised when something pops off. As gentrified as Bed-Stuy is, they shootin’ on the block and they like, “Oh god they shooting!” Yeah, they used to shoot every night over here. I feel like if you don’t know that, you setting yourself up to fail. You’ll find yourself on the wrong block. You’ll get fucked up. I feel like the art is so ritzy now, it’s so clean and so beautiful. It’s a little to sanitized for my taste.

Do you expect the gentrification bubble to burst?

New York is the mecca. It’s one of the world’s capitals. It’s a financial hub. You know what I always thought, like me, personally, Todd? The city starts pricing everybody out. Every apartment is a million dollars and every home is two million dollars. And you’re gonna force everybody who doesn’t have that kind of money to leave. But they’re not gonna leave totally. You’re gonna force them to my area. Brownsville. East New York. The Bronx. If everybody got that kind of money, you still need someone to serve your food and clean your bathrooms and shit. You don’t want them living with you but you want them living close enough so that they can get to you. They’re pushing these poor people into the more impoverished areas and there’s going to be a break down at some point. New York City has always been rich or poor. The extremes are crazy. There was a time when I was coming up in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, we was attacking the rich. I robbed people. It’s what it was. Now it’s kind of more a police state, but I don’t know if the police gonna be able to hold it if things don’t change.

When did you notice that change?

It was under Giuliani. I felt like I saw way more police on the streets. We ran the streets, I never really saw police. Under Giuliani I started seeing lots more detectives.

As a New York City artist, do you ever bring 9/11 into your work?

I have. Every song that I do is not for everybody else to hear. I dealt with a lot of shit that day. I lost a lot. Those songs are the ones I use for therapy. Just for me to get off my chest what I think about.

You seem like you keep a lot of the work you do to yourself.

A lot of this stuff is just for me. I don’t know if guys do that these days. Back in the day, artists had so much material for themselves. Now I think they just throw it out as a mixtape. The market made it so that even your rough drafts, you just put it out there as music. You can pawn it off as a mixtape. Mixtapes now are like albums, but if you say “mixtape” it doesn’t get judged as harsh. If it’s good it’s good. If not, oh, it’s just a mix tape. I don’t put out mixtapes. The songs that I have that don’t make the album are songs for me. My philosophy is that I take a lot of time with this shit. I’m trying to be the best MC that ever walked the planet. That is a feat in itself, because there’s been some amazing MCs. In order to compete with these dudes, I want to have perfect rhymes. I want to have nothing that’s like, man that was kind of a weak bar. I can’t afford that. I ponder and mull over these verses and songs to just give them away. I always put it like this to my people: If you give somebody a diamond, they treasure that fuckin’ diamond. If you give somebody a diamond every day, then after 300, 400, 500 diamonds, that first diamond you gave them don’t mean shit. I’m trying to write diamonds. I gotta give ’em to you and let you sit with it. Polish it. Until you get tired of that diamond, I’m not gonna give you a sapphire.

Have you always considered your legacy so carefully?

I’ve always thought of that. I’ve always that about mortality because I’ve been dealing with death since I was a kid. So many of my friends have passed on. I always thought I was next. I always thought, if this was the last rhyme that I write, I want it to be the dopest rhyme that I write. At my eulogy, if my moms got my art and posted my work on the wall, I want people to be like, “Damn that was ill.” I always wrote with the intention of my legacy. I know you don’t live forever, but I felt like music is the way that I could live forever. Pac is still alive. Biggie’s still alive. Bob Marley is still alive. Beethoven is still alive. Because of music. I knew that from when I was young. 300 years from now when someone picks up Grief Pedigree, they’ll be like, “This dude is that dude!” Or like 500, 1000 years from now they pick up Night’s Gambit, they be like, “What the fuck?” I need my shit to be timeless pieces. That’s why I never mention shit that’s like, now. I need you to pick up that song and you don’t know when it was done.

  

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A Love Supreme
Member since Nov 25th 2003
3078 posts
Thu Oct-24-24 06:28 AM

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15. "Ka gave all of himself at his pop-ups (swipe)"
In response to Reply # 0


          

https://www.hearingthings.co/ka-gave-all-of-himself-at-his-pop-ups/

Ka Gave All of Himself at His Pop-Ups

Remembering the late indie rap hero, who was a scarce public presence but always made time for his devout fans.

Dylan Green
October 18, 2024

If you wanted to meet Ka, your best bet was to see him at one of his pop-ups. The Brownsville, Brooklyn rapper-producer and former FDNY captain, who unexpectedly passed away last weekend at 52, mostly shunned the spotlight. His last published interview was with the Fader in 2016, and he hadn’t performed for an audience in nearly a decade. But when he would announce a new project of breathtakingly concise beats and rhymes, you knew a pop-up—where he would connect with fans and sell his art—was coming soon after. Ka was so scarce that when he decided to make himself seen outside of his neighborhood, people from all across the indie-rap community, from across the country and even the world, would show face. These quickly became community-building events—and Ka, who spent years creating, producing, and distributing his music mostly in solitude, was all about community.

The first Ka pop-up I attended was in 2016, the year he released the hauntingly beautiful Honor Killed the Samurai. He was selling vinyl and CDs from his car trunk outside of the location where the legendary hip-hop record store Fat Beats used to be in Manhattan. I went with my friend and former co-worker Max Weinstein, who had put me on to Ka not long before, and the first thing I noticed was how gracious the rapper was to the small crowd of listeners who came out. He didn’t just give dap and say “thanks for coming out”—he engaged in lengthy conversations with people about life and music.

When it was my turn, I told him I was relatively new to his work but my favorite song on Samurai was “$”—where Ka talks about the values of giving back over a shimmering beat—and that I appreciated the samples from the audiobook of Bushido: The Soul of Japan dotted throughout the album. Then we spent a decent amount of time talking about our favorite underground rap records (at the time, he was really feeling Westside Gunn’s FlyGod) and the importance of journalists like Max and myself working to push independent artists. I bought a record. He signed it and told me it was “great building with you.” The interaction lasted maybe 10 minutes, but I already felt like we were old friends.

After that, I attended every pop-up I could. As Ka gained more recognition, the events upgraded from his car trunk to small storefronts. By 2023, the one he threw for the three records he released during the peak of the pandemic—2021’s A Martyr’s Reward and his 2022 double album Languish Arts and Woeful Studies—had a line that stretched up the block and around the corner. Rap fans of all ages waited for their turn to meet Ka and buy exclusive merch—two people in line that day came from Montreal and Colombia just to see him. But the experience still felt like building with that one family friend you only see around the holidays: We would catch up and talk music, and he would encourage me to keep writing. “You super nice with the pen,” he told me once. It’s one of the heaviest co-signs I’ve ever received.

His last pop-up, which took place September 28, for his recent album The Thief Next to Jesus, was no different. When I pulled up to 104 Charlton Street in Manhattan that afternoon, the event had already been going for three hours, yet a sizable amount of Ka fans, fellow artists, journalists, and friends were still waiting in the rain. When we made it inside, it was clear his operation had expanded even further. Two lines snaked through the small, white room, one for merch and another to talk with Ka. T-shirts, socks, and bandanas adorned with lyrics and album covers were being sold by a small team that included Ka’s wife, Mimi Valdés, the former editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine. Collaborators and indie rap figures, like the producers Preservation and August Fanon and the rappers Navy Blue, Brainorchestra, and Theravada, rolled through to pay their respects. Patrons chopped it up among themselves as they waited to meet the man of the moment. I stood in line for close to two hours to buy merch for myself and a small handful of friends who couldn’t make it, and then waited another 90 minutes to reconnect with Ka. Outside of one five-minute break, he never moved from his post, diligently speaking with every soul who came through. Then he’d pose for a picture, have them sign a blackboard in marker, and give them a pound. No one in attendance knew it would be the last time most of us would ever see him.

Ka caught a second wind at age 39 and spent the next 13 years building a modest and staunchly independent career for himself, staving off smear campaigns and changing rap trends to bring audiences and critics into the sepia-toned diorama of his life. He’s been described as a poet, a philosopher, and, according to veteran producer Alchemist, even a “living prophet… delivering his words from the top of a mountain off a stone tablet.” But as acclaimed and skilled as he was, his appeal to me stems from the fact that he was as regular as they come. He would often cast his life against allusions to mythology, religion, and world history—but the everyday hero born Kaseem Ryan, bruised and scarred by the Brownsville streets of the 1970s and ’80s, always shined through in his slang and diction. “The people love me deeply ’cause I speak that ugly elegant/True, what I do is hood intel, intelligent/Ain’t bold enough to hold your gold?/Aye, you out your element,” he rapped on “Argo,” from 2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens, as apt a self-examination as any he’d ever written.

The Thief Next to Jesus, which is composed almost entirely of gospel samples, examines shaken faith in the face of racism and poverty. It proved he was only getting more potent with age and, on that rainy day last month, it was edifying seeing a crowd eager to dissect lyrics and tell stories with an artist who had brought them together on his terms. That fact has given me solace this week, as figures in every corner of hip-hop publicly mourned a fallen hero; a week where new fans are also discovering the bars and insights that had already won over countless others. Ka gave all of himself in his music—but he somehow gave even more in person, and we’re all better for it. We love you, Kaseem. Peace akhi.

  

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adg87
Member since Jun 22nd 2003
5302 posts
Sat Nov-02-24 04:12 PM

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17. "Okay, I'm just finding out he passed! "
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RIP.

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Nigga, if the shoe fits, then buy the matching purse!" Rass Kass

  

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