The book of Ka

Ka performs during the 2014 Pitchfork Music Festival at Chicago's Union Park on July 19, 2014. Barry Brecheisen/WireImage/Getty Images hide caption

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Barry Brecheisen/WireImage/Getty Images

In 2008, years into an artistic retirement after several failed attempts at a rap career, the Brooklyn scribe Ka finally emerged with his solo debut, Iron Works. He had shelved entire albums on his way to this point, deeming them unfit for the light of day, and even Iron Works was meant principally for friends and family — a talisman he could bestow upon them for all his years spent recording, to prove to them that he really had been working and honing his skill. It wasn’t a demo made in pursuit of a record deal; it was, as he put it, his contribution to the culture. The music radiated that spiritual investment, and eventually found its way to the Wu-Tang Clan’s metrical genius GZA, who told Ka he had a song for the two of them. When Ka showed up to the studio, GZA was there alone; Ka went into the booth and recorded the first verse of “Firehouse,” and when he was done, GZA looked in and simply asked, “You got more?” Ka’s response indicated not just the resiliency he’d shown struggling to realize his calling, but everything that had built up in what must have felt like eons waiting to get the chance to fulfill it: “I got 20 years more.”

I’ve been thinking about that sentiment a lot recently, since it was revealed on October 14 that Ka had unexpectedly died at 52. A late bloomer by his own admission and a side-hustle success story, so much of his personal ethic felt wrapped up in hard hours logged. That isn’t simply because of his day job as a New York fire captain, or the fact that he’d take his overtime money to record marathon studio sessions once a year, or that he was damn near a one-man operation, rapping and beat-making and fulfilling orders for his records himself. It’s because effort and exertion were perceptibly beneath the surface of all of the music that he made, like dirt caked under the nails of a mason. It isn’t hyperbolic to say that Ka is one of the greatest rappers to ever put pen to paper with an enlightened understanding of toil and martyrdom. But perhaps even more importantly, he became a rap heavyweight on his own terms.

To understand Ka, one must first know the journey. Kaseem Ryan grew up on Hopkinson and Saratoga in Brownsville, a turbulent neighborhood in Brooklyn, in a house of 13 people, many of them dope dealers or doers. Penning raps in his composition notebook quickly became an escape; he started selling, too, but he never stopped writing. In 1990, his hustler cousin, Deon, gave him $1,000 to start taking rap — then a cost-intensive process — more seriously. The stretches he spent booking studio time and seeking producers eventually led him to Mr. Voodoo of the group Natural Elements; the two attended city college together, and word was getting around about Ka. Voodoo asked him to join up with four other MCs, all hungry to prove their worth and score a record deal, and Ka found it tough to bloom in the hypercompetitive atmosphere they fostered. Soon after he quit Natural Elements, the group signed with Tommy Boy, leaving him stranded. In its wake, he formed a duo with his childhood best friend, Kev, called Nightbreed. In the Nightbreed songs, you can hear a raw talent coming into focus, but attempts to sell a roughneck style in a genre shifting toward glitz came up short. After starting and then dropping out of a graduate program in education, he joined the FDNY, and, in 2003, he quit rap entirely. He loved his day job, but there was a hole in his life. Two years later, with encouragement from his wife, the Vibe magazine editor-in-chief Mimi Valdés, he returned to his craft. After many false starts, Iron Works was released near the decade’s end. “Some kids are prodigies — they just got it immediately,” he said in a 2016 Red Bull Music Academy lecture. “I was not a prodigy. It took me time to find my voice.”

Across the 10 albums that followed, Ka turned an unrivaled dedication to technique into his own distinctive gospel, becoming the quintessential rapper’s rapper, performing a style he once referred to in song as “highbrow gutter.” “I want my pen to be perfect. That’s what I’m striving to be, an amazing writer,” he said at RBMA. “I didn’t know what a passion was until this hip-hop s***. It wouldn’t let me go; I couldn’t stop. I think about rhymes all the time.” He wasn’t a pull-quote rapper, though he could definitely be quotable; he wrote in body paragraphs, further proof of his intense commitment to writing as a form. “None truer, we were sewer kids / Almost wrong, what we were doing with no tutelage / My speak hail details, theirs too abridged / Polished like I'm on the Tree of Knowledge, chewin' figs,” he raps on “We Living / Martyr.” In his eternal pursuit of the perfect bar and turn of phrase and passage, he demonstrated that the striving was as important as the proficiency.

Writing in a newsletter tribute to the late abbott, the rapper billy woods made a compelling case for the source of the magic in Ka’s process, saying that it was about much more than technical precision or what he referred to as “the weaving dance of simile and metaphor.” “All you have to do is actually, really, listen to the music someone is making and you will know what it cost them,” he wrote. “To make art like Ka made art, you must take a piece of yourself and put it into this thing, this conjuring that we are doing. It demands blood. You have to go in there sometimes and cut something out and bring it, dripping, to the altar. That is what sets his work apart.” I’d argue that the two go hand in hand: It is because of the cost, the blood spilled, that he was able to access something precious — a gift for making dogma of his personal history. “Didn't behave, felt I prepaid my penance / Was ravaged, sun-shallow, slum-deep grave my sentence / When you raised 'round rage and vengeance you can change / But in the veins remains major remnants,” he raps on “Day 811.” His word felt sacrosanct, doctrinal in its approach to street virtue, devotional in its adherence to its hell-or-high-water mentality, powerfully in tune with an awareness that felt just beyond the reach of man. The Alchemist called him “a living prophet,” but Ka was not divinely inspired; his revelations were deeply mortal and exposed. He was more a hood theoretician, applying his experience as study.

In The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, Christopher Vogler writes of drama as a sacred practice, examining the word “catharsis” for its original link to the medical process through which the body expelled poison and waste, and Aristotle’s adoption of it as an art-inspired emotional response bringing nourishment to the soul. Ka, who had a clear respect for myth and its usefulness as a tragic storytelling device (see 2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens, a collab with the producer Animoss), was pushing for catharsis through his own drama. Every outing, he seemed to get a little closer to the answers he sought, which brought listeners closer to understanding his truth — and, by extension, some kind of universal truth. Struggle was such a feature of his writing that his accomplished lyricism came to feel like a triumph in itself: He amassed one of the most undeniable bar-for-bar catalogs in rap history despite never scoring that record deal, despite a fickle landscape that often made his style feel extremely precarious, and despite a random hit piece from The New York Post. I often think about that headline — “FLAME THROWER: FDNY Captain Moonlights as Anti-Cop Rapper” — and what it gets wrong at a basic level. “Moonlighting” implies rap was a second job for Ka, but even a cursory listen to his music reveals it as a mission. In interviews, he talked about how the rhymes never stopped, how even when he quit, he couldn’t escape them. “I think of rhymes every day. I can’t not,” he told The Fader in 2016. “No one knows what they were put here for, but what I do best is write rhymes. That is my gift for this world.”

That compulsive relationship with language may explain why he neither let his beats overpower his lyrics nor went out of his way to emphasize them vocally: The words were so carefully arrayed that he needed listeners to inspect them closely, as if holding up a magnifying glass to an unearthed relic. “Minimalism” is often invoked to describe his work, and it’s true in the most literal sense: The music is spare and simple, straightforward in its presentation. He was not one to project his voice, which was naturally gruff and unanimated, and he rapped as if hesitant to reveal a secret. His songs were rhythmically economical, often lacking any traditional percussion, guided by the subtle bump of the rhymes themselves. But there was an artful sense of detail, one heightening the focus of his proverbs. The samples were cinematic or chillingly eerie, but always restrained, especially when he produced them. It felt like another sign of authority and self-discipline. Ka knew exactly what he was after: His tactics turned his raps into a personal code of honor, left to commemorate the way he lived and extol qualities he hoped to see outlive him: understated yet iron-willed, eager to learn and teach, in search of a quieted but sharpened mind, prepared to take the long way. As one passage from Inazo Nitobe’s Bushido, the Soul of Japan, which Ka sampled for his 2016 album, Honor Killed the Samurai, puts it: “In his eyes beams the fire of ambition, his mind is athirst for knowledge. Worldly goods are in his sight shackles to his character. Virtue is the root, and wealth an outcome.”

Ka put out an album only weeks before his death, and it is as good a testament as any to the values he embodied. You get the full experience on The Thief Next to Jesus: austere backdrops servicing lyrics as eloquent as they are blunt about betrayal and suffering, not trusting charlatans and doing right by your tribe, community preservation and finding comfort in a support system. “Hope the sacrifice match the vice / Speak thoughts sincere to spare the soul / I pray every cross you bear is gold,” he raps. Sacrifice is the defining word of the Ka discography; it animates what he once referred to as his healing journey. He sacrificed for his art, but he was just as eager to honor the sacrifices of others around him, those who made what he saw as his unlikely path possible. Just listen to “I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev)” and you can learn not only what was done on his behalf, but how grateful he was to receive it and pay it forward. “This ain’t just for me,” he told The Fader. “I want my peoples to be represented in this hip-hop s*** because they loved it as much as the next man. It didn’t come our way, for whatever reason. That’s why I take so much time with my s***, I know that the people I was around was some of the best MCs. I had a lot of weight on my shoulders.” You can hear all of that history and responsibility in every single verse he ever wrote. You can hear the weight on his shoulders. You can hear the time taken. You can hear the love. But perhaps, more than anything, you can hear a man pushing to be the best, at any cost.