Ka Was a Superhero

Photo: Ka via YouTube

Walking down 125th Street yesterday, I passed a white kid in a Cam’ron T-shirt who looked about Killa Season years old and thought about the power of rap to move a listener who did not experience the moment in time it depicts, and the tendrils of influence that can’t be tracked through record sales. I grew up in the shamelessly capitalist ’80s and can appreciate an extravagant commercial push. But indie rap proved auteurs didn’t need big hitmakers and major-label expenses to craft a masterpiece. Its heroes sank and swam on the merits of a sharp and unorthodox pen. Underground titans like MF DOOM and Kool Keith found creative agency in shirking prevailing conventions, crafting bespoke worlds outside the jurisdictions of mainstream tastemakers by necessity. Their brilliance defied easy categorization and thus befuddled record labels.

The hyperfocus on sales and virality in mainstream hip-hop ignores the pressure diamonds created underground, where innovation happens by hook or by crook, and is often subsidized by something else. Just as DOOM was molded in part by Elektra Records’ disinterest in releasing KMD’s 1994 sophomore album, Black Bastards, Brownsville veteran Ka — who died over the weekend at the age of 52 — spent the ’90s straining to get works with his groups Natural Elements and Nightbreed on shelves. By the 2000s, he had initiated a solo career that was nearly sidelined to make time for a demanding day job as a New York City firefighter. Juggling the two careers over the years, he left a model for workshopping gripping art on your own time and terms, and reaping the literary gains of walking a unique path even if it limits the reach of your work.

Ka’s death is both numbing and tremendous. He filled the crevices of a seemingly already-full life with creative pursuits. A stream of never-less-than-compelling studio albums gave proof of the benefits of his patient and uncompromising vision while peering into the nature of humanity. He made his late-aughts debut, Iron Works, to leave friends and family a document of the musical career he believed to have run its course. But a friend fatefully passed a copy to GZA, who then featured Ka on 2008’s Pro Tools and put him in touch with Hempstead rapper and producer Roc Marciano. The latter left Busta Rhymes’s Flipmode Squad and became a profound motivational force and kindred spirit in rhyme. (I respect these reversals of fate immensely; I’d planned on quitting music criticism in the 2010s but the Tumblr post I wrote as a swan song paradoxically led to paid writing gigs.)

Slipping into the insular crawl space of a Ka song felt like getting swept up into an epic poem. He rendered Kings County trials in mythic terms, teasing out the universality of the struggle to get by. “Patron Saints” from 2020’s Descendants of Cain pokes around different flavors of corruption, commingling in a New York City populated with disgraced moguls and distrusting citizens. “Our senseis spent days peddling,” he exhales tiredly. “Our heroes sold heroin.” Refusing to crowd a record with a word or a noise that didn’t cut to the bone matter in an instant, Ka rapped like fates in a tragedy warning of the inevitable spoils of a bad decision. He insisted on adding a chilling postscript to the glorification of street life in mainstream rap. “It’s gun this, gang that, son, the most profane rap,” he laments on “Bread Wine Body Blood,” the opener from September’s The Thief Next to Jesus. “It’s just a lot of bored noise that got our boys laying flat / Still a must, ‘Stop killing us’ should be the main pact.” He never approached disorder as an aggrieved old head making morality judgments; he was a narrator standing outside time observing its nagging patterns. A complaint always served a reasoned appeal.

It’s difficult to pick a favorite Ka album; each one feels like a progression of the same core argument that despondency draws out desperate choices. Cain invoked the curse of the Bible’s fratricidal first son in its exploration of intergenerational inner-city adversity. Songs like 2018’s “The Punishment of Sisyphus” compared the cycle to the Tartaran torment of Greek mythology: “Inherited a ready-made plight / Was too heavy, not many made light / Come from regal people, fell from great height.” Alongside Marciano and the increasingly gossamer Alchemist tracks of the last decade, Ka made the most of a stark production. The accompaniments for his terse, precise raps could be an ominous drum groove, like the snake-charming “Cold Facts” off his 2012 breakthrough sophomore effort Grief Pedigree, or a sweetly mesmerizing loop, like the gospel-band riff carrying “Collection Plate” from Thief. Mostly producing and rapping by himself, Ka delivered a meditative anti-calm. Alchemist called him a prophet, and like a hip-hop Jeremiah, he surveyed the decay in his periphery and spoke with startling clarity about where it came from and where it will lead.

As we remember a compact but impactful library of songs for their icy minimalism and discomfiting directness, we mustn’t forget the precariousness of sustaining a life making music that doesn’t capitulate to all the most popular trends. Ka possessed the superpower of making this all feel lovely — in spite of a 2016 New York Post hit piece that tried to frame his music as a disreputable extension of his job with the FDNY, rather than an incredible twin enrichment of New York. He was always affable and accessible, a throwback to the days of Percee P selling tapes outside the legendary downtown record store Fat Beats. But in the era of streaming services tightening purse strings for artists who see the least streams to pay the ones who already make the most, you wonder how many successors to the workaday indie-rap excellence the math can continue to support. And as we continue to lose giants before 60, we’re left to worry like “Patron Saints”: What becomes of a culture deprived of so many mentors?