Behold My Labor

“Unfold my destiny/There's no one less than me/Behold my labor/There's no one greater” - Ka, “Just”

If you have not been following the evolution of underground rap over the last decade or so, the landscape has changed rather dramatically. The boom-bap style that many rappers and groups such as The High & Mighty, People Under The Stairs, Rasco, and Jurassic 5 used in the 1990s and 2000s—in an attempt to maintain the style of the golden era in the face of the overwhelming popularity of labels such as No Limit, Cash Money, and Bad Boy—is passé. To catch a rapper using that style now would honestly be embarrassing.

The point of transition can be disputed. One could make a claim that the artists on Definitive Jux (Aesop Rock, Company Flow, Cannibal Ox, etc.) started to reshape the underground. That’s absolutely true; they did change the form and sent it to another level. However, they were a mutation of the previous form. They were not a radical transformation. That new form does not come until 2010.

Roc Marciano, a rapper who had bars but never really popped off, took affairs into his own hands. His debut album, Marcberg, was a radical break of underground form. Lyrics with dense, internal rhymes are spit over kick-drum-free beats and obscure soul music loops. The world had not seen something like this before, and with this album, the whole underground landscape changed.

In quick succession, many rappers started to appear following Roc’s style. One such rapper is Kaseem Ryan, better known as Ka. A man who pursued rapping in the 1990s only to put it on the back burner to raise his family and work as a firefighter in Brooklyn, Ka, who passed last year at the age of 52, is widely considered to be one of the best rappers in the history of hip-hop, even if his name isn't a household one.

His rhymes, dense with metaphor and symbolism, are delivered in a gravelly monotone. Taking production into his own hands, he used the same methodology as his friend Roc Marci: no kicks and obscure samples. Ka explains his decision to use this production technique in response to a question in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone:

Ka’s thought was absolutely correct. Through the minimalist rhythms of repeating samples with cymbals and drums (never kicks or toms) being used as accents rather than the primary rhythm, the beats on a Ka album are not the driving force of his song; those are the lyrics. Instead, the beats provide the ambiance, framing Ka’s words and establishing the worlds on his albums. In other words, the beats make you listen to the words he's spitting.

Unlike some of the contemporary rappers who crush in the singles format, Ka’s music was never meant for such short-term enjoyment. Ka, speaking to his age and his lineage, is best understood in the album format. It is here, in fully focused 30- to 40-minute sessions, that the true genius comes out. While his first two albums, Iron Works and Grief Pedigree, are full of solid rhymes and beats, they are a relic of his 90s aesthetic. The reasons why I wanted to write this start to appear on his third album, The Night’s Gambit.

On this album, Ka uses the conceit of a chess gambit, sacrificing a piece to get an advantage, to talk about his previous life. As a kid, he got wrapped up in street life in Brownsville, with everything that entails, and gave up a part of himself to survive. This led to a constant internal struggle. He talks about this in the track “Peace Akhi”: “I’m pain in the spoken form/This new strain came from where hope is gone/It’s tough, fuck I’m supposed to focus on, I’m broken torn”. His life in the street becomes a chess game, a war of strategy and precision, ensuring that you don’t get caught out and end up in jail or dead like so many others.

Ka continues to use framing conceits for his albums going forward, providing a framework through which to consider his rhymes and the production. The next album he worked on was Days with Dr. Yen Lo, an album on which Ka collaborated with producer Preservation. Using the story of Dr. Yen Lo, the man who brainwashed Shaw and his fellow soldiers in The Manchurian Candidate, as the framework, the public finally got to hear Ka operating on all cylinders. His intricate lyrics and spacious rhyme style matched well with Preservation's eerie production, inducing a sense of fear, claustrophobia, and disorientation over the album’s 39-minute runtime.

There is a track at the end of this album, “Day 93,” that haunts me every time I listen to it. The track follows a protagonist who has been programmed into solving all issues with guns, much like Shaw when he's activated. As Ka rhymes, “Fact is, no statement retracted, prone to reach/It’s feet first, heat burst, domes are breached.” The haunting part is the hook: “I’m wondering if them sirens for me/Here they come again, I’m wondering if them sirens for me.” Ka chants this as the beat fills the space, reinforcing the streets’ ambivalence toward the use of violence, never considering its full consequences.

As bleak as that idea is, Ka offers no respite. He wants you to sit in the violence of the streets and consider its effects both on you and the people who are living in it on a day-to-day basis, how it affects their well-being and how it affects their faith in the world. This is a continuing concern that permeates his discography following Days with Dr. Yen Lo. Even though his work is rooted in the misery of life in the ghetto, Ka understands that he is walking and writing rhymes; he made it out. It wasn’t easy, but he made it. This provides a light to the sometimes overwhelming bleakness that can surround his tales.

While it took him a long time to get on, Ka found himself at an exciting juncture in underground rap music. As I noted at the beginning, the old style was fading and a void was created, one which was filled by stylistic minimalists like Roc Marciano and Ka. I cannot overstate how much influence that these two have had.

On a stylistic level, their minimal style has influenced the Griselda clique (e.g., Westside Gunn, Benny the Butcher, Boldy James), The Alchemist, Conductor Williams, and many other producers and rappers who have opted to eschew boom bap maximalism for sample-based minimalism with a distinct emphasis on lyrics.

On the lyrical level, Ka is your favorite rapper's favorite rapper. He is a favorite of the most innovative rappers working right now. You like Earl Sweatshirt? He loves Ka. You listen to Mike? He admits that Ka is a huge influence on his style. What about Mach-Hommy? Yea, Ka was a massive influence on him too. Ka's formal precision and imagery lingers through the underground, making us all happier in that we don't have to listen to Playboy Carti ad-libs all the time.

It's sad that it took his death for so many to pay attention to him, but in some ways, it is fitting. He is a man who didn't call attention to himself. He had a day job; rapping was a hobby. (Consider that for a second.) He was a man who realized that he had the ability to write and tell stories over beats, and just wanted to get them out. When he dropped albums (that he released on his own label), he would post up on a street corner and sell them out of his car. Ka loved hip-hop and its culture. It was never about the money for him. It was always about the art. And there are few rappers like that now.

If you have read all of this and are now curious, here's a taste. This is the video that Ka made for his song “Jungle” from The Night's Gambit:

If this piqued your interest, go and explore his archive, but maybe not all of it at one time. That can be a bit dark.

Before I sign off, a reasonably large change of affairs here. So, these deep dives are cool, and I really like doing them. That said, my new music listening has gone to shit as a result. In an effort to fix this (and to get back to why I started this whole thing a bit more), I'm going to do one more dispatch a week. It will be short and sweet, like Sabrina Carpenter (I had to, it was right there). How many albums will it be? I don't know, but I can give you an idea of the format.

See, a breezy read. It'll take you like two minutes to ingest. I should also specify that these records might be chronologically new as well as new to me (meaning older).

So, next week (it'll be Tuesday or Wednesday), you'll see the first of those. I'll come up with a name for it in the coming days. To adjust for this, the longer dispatches will start dropping on Saturdays instead of Fridays, just like this one did. Let me know how the short posts work for you as a person in the world.

As for next week, you'll see a longer post about something relating to women as March is Women's History Month. Whatever it is, it's going to be upbeat. I love Ka, but day after day of hardcore street talk makes you want to escape to a warmer place emotionally. It'll be bringing only positive vibes. I can assure that.