Kaseem Ryan, a two-decade New York City Fire Department (FDNY) veteran and beloved husband, died unexpectedly over the weekend. But Ryan, of course, was also Ka, an influential and beloved underground rapper, and the searching, brilliant music he made will live on.
Ka began his rap career as part of the crew Natural Elements. You can listen to a 1994 radio freestyle here. The clip showcases a tough-talking, punchline-heavy style that presents a stark contrast to his later, sparser efforts — “I’ll blast you in the face while I hum ‘Amazing Grace’ / You wanna hear it, step up and get a taste.” But despite some record label interest, things didn’t work out. In later years, Ka loved to repeat the self-deprecating story of how the group only got a deal after he left.
In 1999, after Natural Elements and his follow-up project, the duo Nightbreed, flamed out, Ka became a firefighter and dialed back his rhyming, eventually leaving music behind altogether in 2003. Then, a few years later, a second act. Ka seemed, as he started making music again while approaching middle age, to be different. He was a fully-formed artist, with a calm, hypnotic delivery that still somehow had a burning intensity. His minimal, often self-produced beats showcased his approach perfectly.
Ryan’s day job and his rap career rarely intersected in any public way, at least until the New York Post decided to do a hit piece on him in 2016, aghast at the FDNY captain whose “double life as a hip-hop artist” included songs “peppered with the N-word, drugs, violence and anti-cop lyrics.”
But, in their race to be racist, the Post missed the point entirely. The care for the community that he evinced as a captain for the fire department was the same care and love that came through in every bar of his raps.
That was the thing about Ka: no matter whether his central metaphor was chess (The Night’s Gambit), Greek mythology (Orpheus vs. the Sirens), The Manchurian Candidate (Days With Dr. Yen Lo), or the Old Testament (Descendants of Cain) the subject of the metaphor was the same: his people, his Brooklyn neighborhood, and how his own life experiences — including some notably dark ones — could inform and help them.
“Everybody in my family was on crack,” he told Rolling Stone about growing up. “I felt like my youth was just stolen from me. A lot of my music is me trying to come to grips with that and make sense of it all. Why did I have to live through that? To be the artist that I am today — that’s how I justify it. To affect people that’s going through hard times now.”
This message wasn’t only on the albums themselves. It showed up in how he promoted them: directing and editing his own videos. It also showed up in how he sold them: Ka was famous for mailing out his albums to fans personally, for showing up at record stores to meet supporters, and for holding DIY album release events. At these events, attendees recall, he would make sure that everyone felt welcomed and special.
Ka showed his trust and love for people in the purity of his artistic vision, in his pursuit of the sublime. His albums unfolded to the listeners through close, sustained attention. He laid it out in a 2015 interview.
“An album is not supposed to reach you at the first listen,” he said. “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 might not like track two, right now, but that shit fits on the sequence of the album. I’m trying to make beautiful albums.”
Towards the end of that same sit-down, Ka ruminated on Shakespeare’s famous sentiment about death. “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon had Caesar say. “The valiant never taste of death but once.” The Bard of Brownsville put a twist on that concept for one of his own songs — “Now destiny is one death for me, not a thousand.” He looked back at a life that had taken him from crack-era struggles to artistic triumph and acknowledged that his scars are what made him who he is. For a brief moment, the man so fond of self-depreciation sounded rightfully proud.
“I have no fear of the things that a lot of people are afraid of. I lived that life. 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,” Ka explained. “When I die, it will be the first and only time that I die.”
