Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses
Seven Souls
The ancient Egyptians believed our souls have multiple aspects, functions — some call the count at three, others seven, others nine. The spirit, the vital spark, was called Ka: breathed into us at the moment of birth, the soul that makes us alive. After death, the Ka is the only reliable guide of through the Land of the Dead. In hieroglyphs, the Ka is represented as a second image of the Pharaoh, the unseen double. But unlike the other souls, the Ka was sustained with food and drink, even after death. Even a soul gotta eat. Of all the rituals performed at Egyptian funerals, the most important was the Opening of the Mouth, a symbolic cutting. It enabled the dead to pass into the afterlife seeing, hearing and breathing, and able to eat to sustain the Ka. You here in the spirit? You only brung flesh. I keep it primal ’til it’s final, who wanna come test?
There are so, so many rappers who put out a record or two and then disappear off the face of the earth, from Chubb Rock to Skipp Coon, Yeshua DapoED, Micranots, B.U.M.S., Call O’ Da Wild…it’s a long roster of MIAs. Ka is the sole survivor. He is the one who returned from the land of the dead. It’s a singular tale of how talent, strength, compulsion and perseverance overcomes all the barriers between rhymes in a notebook, rhymes rattling around a mind, and our ears. But his survivor’s story is also what made him hone his craft so completely, so singularly, so deftly and sharply that he re-emerged as the ultimate rapper’s rapper, whose poetry is written with a splash of blood.
Ka is the Pharoah’s double of Nas; he’s the alt-Nas, the doppelganger — which literally means ‘double walker.’ They walked the same road until they diverged in a yellow wood, and Ka took the one less traveled. He is the Nas who doesn’t get a record deal, or who gets dropped by Columbia after delivering an It Was Written that’s in the same cold vein as Illmatic, and vanishes like so many others.
I am usually disinterested in a rapper’s bio; suturing rubbery ligaments between background and artistry is mostly lazy and boring. But Ka’s work, his style, his execution is all heavily informed by the mythic tale from there to here. This is what the Egyptians called Khet or Sekhu: the physical body, the soul of blood.
Ka grew up in Brownsville, through the heroin era of the ’70s and the crack era of the ’80s. He told the Fader: Hull Street was my block. I caught the ringworms on that block. I played in the lots on that block. I fought on that block. He said to Out Da Box: I write from pain, that’s my pocket. This is the second soul, Sa, the avenging spirit; or the Sekhem — what gives you power, light, energy. The undercurrent of your lifeblood.
As he told Jeff Mao at Red Bull Music Academy:
Just having my whole formative years of going through that, of course I’m damaged from that. The art right now is helping me heal through that. I would get candy from the dope fiends, because the dope fiends, if you don’t know, they always like candy after their high…Then the dope went away and the crackheads came. It was a lot of drugs, a lot of violence and it was crazy but that’s what made me.
Like many, hip hop spoke to him, writing his first rhymes at twelve — ’89 or ’90. As he said to Alex Piyevsky for Passion of the Weiss: It was horrible, but you couldn’t tell me that at the time. I played it over and over. I played it for my little sister and she was reciting the words, it was beautiful. I played it enough to the point of tricking myself into thinking that flow was aight, but it was horrible.
So here is the third soul, Ba: the form of a bird with your head. It is identity, personality, power, psyche, heart, but also reputation, legacy. He tells Jeff Mao:
It was a passion. I didn’t know what a passion was until this hip-hop shit. It wouldn’t let me go, I couldn’t stop. I think about rhymes all the time. When I’m talking to somebody, and they say something, I’m hearing the rhyme that would go perfectly with that. Or I’m listening to other people’s songs, and I’m like, “He rhymed that wrong. He should have rhymed this. That shit would have hit right.”
There are people who are chosen to create, inhabited, possessed — of the seven souls, this one awakes and cannot be stilled, always in the psychic background demanding more, more words, more art. An earworm that doesn’t stop wriggling.
Everything in Ka’s legend is weighted, symbolic: he goes on to connect with Mr. Voodoo to join Natural Elements. The Elements battled for who would get the dopest beats. In the vodou kanzo ceremony, the initiate performs the bat ge: the ‘beating war,’ singing a hundred and one songs, whipping the earth with ropes, clashing machetes.
You can hear Ka on 1998’s Lyricist Lounge, that’s him on the hook: Put on your shield, proceed with the rest. But his voice and flow is unrecognizable to us now, and that era was merciless: too many MCs, not enough mics. He started a duo, Nightbreed, with his man Kev, who would later be killed in a car crash. (More doubles, more doppelgangers: shades of Nas and Ill Will, Zev Love X and Subroc, KRS and Scott La Rock, the brother/partner lost, the infusion of grief, the phantom limb.) Nightbreed put out a 12” — it’s again heavy with Ka’s motifs: the joints are called “2 Roads Out the Ghetto” and “Long Time Coming.” (It’s also freighted with very extremely 1998 signifiers: Ka is going by ‘The Verbal Shogun’ and Kev as ‘Oddbrawl the Lyrical Juggernaut.’ No carbon, you can date most hip hop records within 2–5 years off MCs’ monikers alone.)
This is the fourth soul, Ren: the name. One myth speaks of Isis gaining power over Ra himself by learning his secret name. The erasing of a name from a monument or tomb would erase you from the afterlife. Tomb texts would beg visitors to say their name so they would flourish in the afterlife. Without your name, you’re nothing. And this is also the fifth soul, which is the Ka.
Two roads out the ghetto: success or death. Time to choose. Again, it doesn’t sound anything like the Ka we’ll come to know, except maybe for the multi-line rhymes. It sounds like every other almost-ran East Coast/underground/street group of the era, it’s undistinguished. Ironically, it’s also engineered with the drums way too high in the mix.
And then…that was it. Couldn’t get a record deal:
At that time there was so much talent out that you could get lost even if you were dope. You could pick any and everybody and they would be dope, so we got lost in the shuffle. We just felt like maybe we should get jobs, you know be family men and things of that nature. So that’s what we did, we quit. It was a tough decision because we both loved it. We said we quit but as an artist, lyrics keep coming to you so every day I was struggling with should I be doing this, should I not be doing this? You know, fighting myself, like this is a young man’s dream.
He and Kev give up on music: this is the story of so many rappers, so many artists. The dusty boxes of unsold 12”s in the attic. Always that nagging feeling it could’ve been more. For some, maybe that youthful stab at music is a dalliance, just trying to boogie and get over with the ladies, make some paper, live the high life for a bit. For others, there’s still the music inside that can’t get out, that trapped seventh soul. Life’s an album, don’t end yours on an interlude.
Ka becomes a firefighter, putting out actual flames to try and douse those inside him, all those fiery words that can’t be tamed. Learned to die for last and let your heat blaze. Firefighting is a strange profession if you think about it: the same ranked structure, discipline, training, uniform and gear as a military unit, of police — but the battle is against heat, flame, destruction; an enemy without a face or a shape or morality or end. It’s like being a warrior against violent entropy, against random and terrible destruction. Not against people, but against one of the natural elements.
There is a discipline and focus that informs him later: he speaks of twenty-four hour shifts at the fire station, in comparison to how he’ll book a twelve hour studio session. Later, that it takes him a year to find twelve samples for an album, all-day digging expeditions.
And, Ka is a firefighter on 9/11. We don’t know much of anything about this, except that he lost compatriots that day: more loss, more trauma. There are 9/11 Ka songs — think about this! Imagine what they must be like! He told VICE: 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. He does once allude to it, on “With All My Heart” (as well as clapping back at the New York Post smear): When them planes crashed, Ka did his task, in the catastrophe / I dug and I held when them towers fell, how dare you try and hassle me?
That’s how his voice changes, I think, becomes the low rasp we hear on the records we know: it’s from smoke inhalation. It’s weathered from breathing in the fumes and the ash of devastation, of loss, of the dead. This is the next soul, Ib: the heart. Essential to surviving death and proof as to how its bearer lived. The first trial of the afterlife was the Maat Kheru: your heart, the deeds of your life, weighed against an ostrich feather. If they did not balance, the Devourer consumed your heart.
These are the years in the wilderness, of silence, of exile. He told Complex:
I was dead, musically. I was just doing music for myself, writing in my room, writing rhymes that I could just throw away because, you know, nobody cares what I have to say.
Chose the path, forty years through the desert like Moses with the staff. Part of what makes Ka so captivating is this deep compulsion, this fire next time, this fire of words within he can’t put out or contain. As he tells Piyevsky:
You know what, it’s constant. Sometimes it’s not even something I do intentionally. I’m home and I get a couple of lines and I gotta write that down, like I need that right now. And I’m mad if I don’t put it down on paper and I forget it, I’m fucked up for the rest of the day. Feeling like I had an ill bar, and just from that bar could spark a song, and from that song could spark an album. But yeah, every day I do put something down on paper. Every day.
It’s not even the artist’s ego of needing to be heard, of flexing your talent. There are mountains of rhymes inside him trying to get out — not into the world, but simply outside his soul:
I’ve done a thousand songs. But some of them will never be heard. Some of them aren’t intended for public consumption. It’s personal, just working out my feelings through the writing…I’ve done an album where I know nobody would ever hear that album except me.
This is the sixth soul: Khaibit, or Shut — the shadow, the memory. Your shadow is always present, inescapable, always following you, it’s what’s left of the self when the light’s blocked out. When darkness falls, your shadow disappears — not to be reborn until the sun rises again. The nightbreed.
Egyptian mythology, the iconography, the pyramids — all of it is about the hunger for immortality. To be known and remembered far beyond, far past our time on this plane. I battle hard like a promise from God to be immortal. Across Ka’s work, there is a tension between the ever-present threat of death, of violence — doing and receiving, the ghosts of the dead on every corner — but parallel to that is his desire to be remembered. For his art, his iron works. He says things like this over and over in interviews:
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…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, 1,000 years from now they pick up Night’s Gambit, they be like, “What the fuck?” I need my shit to be timeless pieces.
Metal Clergy
So around ten years after Nightbreed, he decides to let it out. It’s an album that’s an era, an eon, an Iron Age, not just a decade or year in time. I live slow days, fast nights, hundred year half-life. He said to Mao:
I couldn’t stay away from the shit. It was like, I’m trying to. I threw books away, I threw all my notebooks away. I was like, “I’m not doing this shit no more. Fuck this shit, it ruined my life.” But I couldn’t stop, so I came back with the help of people that loved me, and were like, “You’re good. Just do it.” That’s how I got back.
That strength, that refusal to bow to silence, and the insurmountable force of those words. Stayed quiet for years, then hunger fired my gears. And ten years of sharpening his craft, beating the metal, fashioning it into a blade, then melting it down and folding it again, honing it again, until he’s forged Iron Works. Most classics, most great albums: it’s the exact right combination of beats, of samples; of rappers, of lyrics — at exactly the right time. But the artistic leap for Ka happens in solitude, in silence, with no one waiting for it or even having any idea he’s doing it.
This is Ka as James Hampton: externally, a Washington DC janitor like Ka is a firefighter; in private, the self-appointed Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity. In secret, late nights and weekends, taking scavenged detritus the streets gave him and slowly, laboriously and silently crafting a huge work of deeply felt, personal and visionary art. (And like Rammellzee, not only did he find God and art in the garbage, but as an untrained artist of color, he was locked out of the support and accolades he deserved.)
From 1950 to 1964, in a rented garage, Hampton built his Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly from aluminum foil, cardboard, jars, mirror shards, burnt out lightbulbs, candy wrappers, old furniture. It’s made up of 180 objects centered around a seven foot throne crested with “FEAR NOT.” The altars, pulpits, tablets and crowns are inscribed with quotes and prophecies; Hampton had visions telling him to prepare for Christ’s return. Covenants and commandments hand-scribed in his St. James: The Book of the 7 Dispensation. Like all rap music, it is written in coded language, only to be read by adepts, the chosen, those who know — it has yet to be deciphered. All of this, in service of faith, a vision.
After Hampton died of stomach cancer at 55, the garage’s landlord found the throne. He’d had no idea what Hampton had been doing in there, though Hampton had once said to him: “That’s my life. I’ll finish it before I die.” It’s only dumb chance that the landlord didn’t toss it all in a dumpster, and that his newspaper ad caught the eye of sculptor Ed Kelly, who brought art collectors and Robert Rauschenberg to see it.
The throne is now in the Smithsonian, where it belongs, but by a near miracle, a lucky break. The assistant director said that walking into the garage “was like opening Tut’s tomb.” On a bulletin board in the corner of this garage tabernacle, Hampton tacked a quote from Proverbs 29: Where there is no vision, the people perish.
As Ka said to Brimmers:
Hip hop don’t have a museum like this yet but if we have, I want to be a wing. 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.
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 breathe. You become free.
Ka would’ve been Rap James Hampton, if not for GZA. This is where the path in the woods diverges from all those ‘whatever happened to,’ every ‘had a dope 12” in the ’90s’ artist. He gives copies of Iron Works to family and friends, and someone gives it to GZA. Somehow — think about how many demos a dude like GZA must be handed on the daily! — GZA listens to it, and he feels it.
And just like how GZA anointed Killah Priest thirteen years earlier by giving him the entire “B.I.B.L.E.” track on Liquid Swords, he crowns Ka by giving him a slot on Pro Tools in 2008. As Ka told RBMA: I’m going to the booth and I spit the first verse….Then he looks in the booth and was like, “You got more?” And I was like, “I got twenty years more. What you need?”
The joint is called “Firehouse,” a secret inside joke, as it’s years before the rest of us find out Ka’s profession. And the beat is by Roc Marciano, pre-Marcberg. This is ridiculously freighted; in a movie it’d be a lazy contrivance. Two of the most heavily acclaimed artists of the next decade, brought together by the Genius, the Wu Scientist: spooky action at a distance. Ka’s lyrics are already laden with what’s to come, where he’s been: Slow and steady win the race, step aside, let the tortoise by.
It’s the Opening of the Mouth. It doesn’t get Ka a deal, but it’s affirmation enough. Marci is developing his drumless, stripped down beat style and instructs Ka on this.
(Among rap legends, there are the unicorns, the cryptozoology of mythical unreleased albums: Rakim x Dre, DOOMStarks, Detox, Heltah Skeltah, R.A.G.U. (are we still waiting on Jay Electronica? No? We got what we got?)…there is the underground head’s grail: Ka x Marci’s Metal Clergy album, Piece Be With You. In 2012 Ka was saying there were nine or ten songs and it was 80% done. He says this every couple of years whenever he’s asked, including earlier this year. From the lost ark of albums, this is the one still worth waiting for.)
Between Grief and Nothing, I Will Take Grief
Ka recorded Grief Pedigree at a Greenpoint studio called The End. He was on the edge of things. It was the precipice — the beginning of something, or the final chapter. This is the seventh soul, Akh: the intellect, the spirit which survives death and mingles with the gods.
He reduces rap to its natural elements: stripped down loops, couplets of street pain at their barest, all delivered with economy and exacting precision — entire epics, compressed. It’s elevating rap to a level of concrete abstraction — no logos, no skits, no gun sounds, no swagger, bare bones of stories.
Ka crafts his lyrics like the great Odessan short story writer Isaac Babel:
When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time…One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And the key must be turned once, not twice…Each time I begin rewriting, I work until I can no longer detect a single grain of dirt…a simile must be as exact as a slide rule and as natural as the smell of dill.
During the Stalin era, Babel became a ‘master of silence,’ writing loads but publishing nothing. His last recorded words — before he was taken away and shot in a basement by the KGB — were: I am asking for only one thing: let me finish my work.
Grief Pedigree was Ka’s last shot, one last score. Decisions, decisions to make. Epic fail or nice success. Days of pleasure or nights of stress. As he told Hardwood Blacktop:
I made every song on Grief Pedigree like it was the last song I might ever record. I want people to rock my shit forever and ever, so I that’s why I flooded every line. You might ask a thousand people who their favorite rapper is, and six hundred might say Jay-Z, a hundred might say Nas, a hundred might say Kanye, but if one person says me, that’s what I do this for. So that’s why I make every song like it’s my last.
Every line, and Ka’s scratchy, low voice, shows weariness, wisdom, struggle. Pedigree alone took two years, he says: “one year writing, one year digging.” The whole product shows the stamp of true handmade craft. The cover as well as the content is on some Romare Bearden type beat.
Pedigree, like all of Ka’s work, is a reverse illdungsroman — a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories about a young man, written when he was older, and can look back not only with a sense of loss and regret, but also a pervasive sense of mortality.
The past is always present in Ka’s work — yeah dunn, we know, it’s never dead, it’s not even past. Ka’s raps are always whispers and memories and scars. He’s always the last man standing. He’s always doing his dirt all on his lonesome. It’s elegies, regrets, tales of days gone by. Between the two Biblical albums (Cain and Thief), he circled back to bookend Grief with A Martyr’s Reward, Languish Arts and Woeful Studies. A Martyr’s Reward is focused on debts: what’s owed, by Amerikkka, its carceral systems, those who prey on his community but also hip hop culture. And what he owes, to his audience, to his people. Putting aside the self-imposed constraints of the conceptual thematics of the other albums, his craft is so refined that all small variations on the double LP are heightened: the faster flow on “We Hurting,” “Obstacles” and “Building.” The looser beats, and flutes threaded throughout; the bold discordance on “Ascension.” The lightly inferred sermon on “Eat.” He actually lets the beat ride on “If Not True” for thirty entire seconds, the biggest fermata in his discography.
Ka’s beats are ghosts of fat beats for the man who plies his trade outside the ghost of Fat Beats: stripped down to base metals, barely loops but so finely chosen, only a hint of drums, like it’s been unraveling slowly off that same damn ’Lo sweater from ’93, til infinity. He layers in adlibs of his own voice like the seven souls, the voices in his head. Ka doesn’t write hot sixteens, but series of linked couplets that are more haikus or tankas:
I live in these bars
Might be hard to find
a better prisoner
Ka doesn’t do shows: more shaman than showman. He doesn’t have a label. He’s only done a handful of features, ever (for GZA, Marci, Chuck Strangers, Preservation and Navy Blue). What started as thrift, James Hampton style, has become an ascetic statement, total control but also self-imposed limitations. He makes his own beats (mostly). He makes his own videos. He ships everything himself. For almost every record, he’s done a street pop up. At the first one for Grief in 2012, on a brick winter day, few showed up: I didn’t go gold that day, put it like that. But among those who did was the producer Preservation, who’d come at Mos Def’s recommendation. That’s how they met, another ridiculously biopic moment. In 2023, the line at his pop up was two blocks long — he built it, and they came.
Unless They Some Smart-Ass Pawns
Ka followed Grief up with albums that play with concepts without losing their grounding in chainlink and streetlight. The baseline is always street rap: poverty, deprived childhoods, criminology, the nadir mathematics of drug deals. In parallel, each album has taken on a theme that’s often also a common rap trope: chess, samurai, heaven and hell, myths. But he’s considered them so deeply and thoroughly that they’re elevated above and beyond Brooklyn heights.
His drumless beats are made of the barest of samples, infinite loops that extend and freeze time. No hooks: he renders what is caesura unto caesura. That voice never changes: he’s whispering in your ear, to himself, like you’re listening from next door with a glass against the wall. From the RBMA interview:
I felt like I was fighting drums, a lot. On my tracks. I’m like, if I strip the drums down, I don’t have to be so loud on the track. It actually brings you closer to me, because without the drums the percussion of my voice…It brings you closer to the words. It brings you closer to the feeling.
The Night’s Gambit, like all of Ka’s albums, is a fully realized epic novel pared down and pared down and whittled down once again until each line can stand alone, the letters cut into steel by steel, then polished smooth with his sandpaper muttering. He’s taken GZA’s line-twisting, syllable-by-syllable build and compressed it even further — taken all the pieces off the cover of Liquid Swords.
I read this article saying that, if you apply enough pressure, atoms rearrange themselves — so much so that peanut butter ups become diamonds. Ka slices down to the bone until the words glisten with lapidary brilliance. As he said to VICE: 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.
There are two undercurrents on Night’s Gambit: the spiritual search for meaning and the discipline that comes with it; and chess—the fifth element of hip-hop since the Wu era. But for Ka it becomes not only another mode of self-mastery, and the view of us as pawns in the game, but also a call of resistance: that the knight can champion, move sideways and attack. There’s other thematics — about luck, about chance, about destiny, and the search for grace. As he said to Julian Brimmers for Passion of the Weiss: It’s a strong game, if it even is a game, I don’t know. Chess is something else. And at the end of the game, the king and the pawn both lie down in the same box.
Poetry With A Splash Of Blood
Even as the stack of albums keeps growing, Yen Lo is the one I return to most. On the one, Preservation brings richer, lusher beats that work more directly in counterpoint to the words. Or as Ka says: One sacred loop, one naked truth, my lane’s suited.
The album uses The Manchurian Candidate as its jumping off point, but it’s not really about that. It moves in a haze from Day 0 to Day 1125 in no order. The days are out of order because time is not in order; Ka’s career has had a backwards, sidewinding trajectory, shuffled like a deck of cards — watch the Red Queen, watch the Red Queen, round and round she goes, where she stops nobody knows. In three card monte, it’s the Queen of Diamonds; in The Manchurian Candidate, the Queen of Hearts is the killer trigger. How’re you gonna play the hand, how’s it gonna play you?
It’s a fever dream, a delirium. Yen Lo is the mad scientist of the book/movie, the evil genius, mind manipulator, assassin maker, devious torturer. But while Ka alludes to indoctrination, brainwashing, cultural hypnosis, programmed violence, and state-sponsored terror, it’s a delicately sketched motif. Is he linking Dr. Yen Lo with Dr. Yacub or the Tuskegee experiment or MKULTRA? Is he saying young brothers are brainwashed killers, Manchurian Gangstas? I don’t think so. It’s maybe a sideways allusion. When you’re raised around rage and vengeance / you can change, but in your veins remains major remnants.
Hemingway famously compared a story to an iceberg, in that you only see the tip of it and the rest remains submerged beneath the surface, word again to GZA. But Ka’s writing is thicker than Jupiter’s moon Europa: sixty miles of ice to get to the iron core. Yen Lo reaches his tightest compression, takes everything out that can possibly come out, demanding the most of our attention and giving the least of how to interpret it, painting with pointed syllables. Blood, blood, blood with the pen flow. It’s Rap Game Robert Ryman, who for decades created hundreds of works only with white — just one palette, working instead in subtleties of shades and layers and thicknesses, forcing you to look closer, to really see:
No saints, so paint black portraits and I bought this
In fact, the cracks on my surface lead course shift
Damaged canvas from times they drew on me with four-fifth
Tamahagane
Ghost Dog didn’t die at the end of The Way of the Samurai. He lives in a Brownsville basement, waking at 3am from PTSD nightmares and digging in the crates for the dustiest loops. This what mold me, that cold and lonely.
Honor Killed The Samurai carries on Ka’s tradition of both reducing and elevating rap and some of its well-worn hits; a deeper take than we usually get on hattori hanzos. Just as there’s the elements of hip-hop, Zen includes the tea ceremony, sword fighting and calligraphy — the art and meditation practice of writing just one letter, just one thought, after long and careful clearing of the mind, with one chance only to get it right. So it is, as always, with Ka: street-level frescoes carved on grains of rice. It’s origami folded from old newspapers, like James Hampton, like Olmos in Blade Runner. As he told Jeff Mao: I saw the Japanese flicks where it wasn’t all the pageantry of the karate flicks, it was just one sword swipe, the fight is over…I think them taking their lives for honor was just something that I felt like I was doing for my art.
It’s the same themes: strength, honor, discipline, skill, decisions in the space of seven breaths. But Ka’s acknowledging that these codes are obsolete, outmoded, and going to get you deaded — should you reject how things have changed, or move with the times? He’s mulling this about the streets but also the rap game. And the samurai disdained modernity the way an old school DJ disdains sampling off YouTube: they’d cover their heads with a fan when they had to walk under a power line, refused to ride trains or carry guns. So guess what happened to them when they faced riflemen infantry during the Satsuma Rebellion. Is it better to die with honor or survive? To carry on True MCing Tradition or have that club hit? Keep it gutter, or get butter-dipped?
The Hagakure is known as The Way of the Samurai, the guide for the warrior, the code of bushido. But its actual translation is Fallen Leaves, because even by the time it was written in the 1700s, the samurai’s way of life was already fading. The opening paragraph gets straight to the bitching about how the game ain’t the same:
Although it stands to reason that a samurai should devote himself wholeheartedly to The Way, this seems to be neglected everywhere. If you ask, ‘what is the true meaning of the Way of the Samurai?’ the person who would be able to answer promptly is rare…this negligence is beyond belief.
That’s some “hip hop’s been dead since Kane hung up the mic” type beat, the endless tension in hip hop of the loss of respect for tradition, the culture; the kids today have no loyalty and only go for self, the game ain’t the same — and this is also the same plot as every gangster story, whether The Wire or The Sopranos.
I guess most people read some kinda Greatest Swordstrokes version of the Hagakure (since a lot of it also is a bunch of Miss Manners-sama type shit about always use a toothpick, don’t walk around with your hands in the pockets of your hakama, etc.) — just all the hardcore stuff about making one final stroke even if your head is cut off and such, and starting with its second paragraph:
The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When a warrior comes to a life-or-death situation, there is for him only the quick choice of death. Be determined and advance…If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.
This is Ka’s way. Rap always plays the tension between lust for life, for riches and death, the costs and consequences — ends vs. ends, burning. Ka leans heavily into the nearness of mortality, just around the corner, but without the usual rap reveling in violence or the nihilism: he doesn’t want it, maybe he deserves it, yet it’s always near.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Calling himself Orpheus on this one isn’t hubris: the name comes from the roots of slave, rebel, darkness, orphan. Ka knows street rap is the crafting of epics, of legends — honor and betrayal, heroes and monsters, journeys and battles. The Warriors knew this. So the homie went Homeric, reached back to the Greek myths to infuse the struggles, lets Animoss lace some lighter beats that ring the Harryhausen and Dionysus panpipes. What word hurt me, Euterpe was the nine I used. That golden fleece was North Face. That cyclops, a crooked cop. That weight on your shoulders? We’re all Atlas out here, son. He’s the poet, prophet and musician who went to Hull and made it back. Jinxed to be the man deciphers life’s riddle or get killed by the Sphinx.
(Look, we already did Egyptian mythology so I’m not deep diving on the Greeks up in here too. This is not the fucking Discovery Channel.) Ka’s themes aren’t concept albums as much as framing devices (e.g. he doesn’t do sword talk on Samurai) — and this would’ve quickly become a strained gimmick. Orpheus leans in more than others on an ill Iliad, especially on lead track “Sirens,” but it’s mostly alluded in the song titles, samples, and lines here and there, maybe a couple per joint: Carve a dozen bars harder than the Twelve Labors.
But Ka’s album themes give us an entry point and a differentiation between the records, which otherwise might be impossible to crack, find a way in. He’s not going to unpack the title of “The Punishment of Sisyphus,” even though if anyone’s life has been Sisyphean, it’s Ka’s: Inherited a ready-made plight. Was too heavy, not many made light.
This is a cat who layers in internal rhymes with Hephaestus forging:
The worst evaded perpetrators are the ones you don’t suspect
To never get crossed by gift horse like when the Trojans slept
…that perfect-imperfect ‘don’t suspect’ vs. ‘Trojans slept.’
He’s even more known for his double layering which splice the rhymes, double the work in half the words:
Get hands on cannons for your picture, you could pose a threat
Can’t link if wasn’t linking before I had one penny
The Greeks had two words for time: kronos, for quantitative time — hours, days, years — and kairos, meaning the right time. The right moment to convey the right message, with symmetry and balance — the moment to release the arrow so it’ll hit the target. That’s what Ka does. He knows that just because strippers know all the words to your song, it’s just money on the clock. He writes for the ages.
Sacramental Perspectives
From the start, Ka’s laced his work with Bible references — “Our Father,” “Up Against Goliath,” “30 Pieces of Silver,” and so on sprinkled lyrically. When he started theming albums, the Old Testament was an obvious endpoint. He’s always grasping for the heavy underneath the story. That Carhartt coat of multicolors. The book of original sin, of exodus, slaves to Pharoah, builders of the pyramids, forty years in the desert. Ka is always examining the duality of man, the saint and sinner. Cain and Abel? Jealous brothers. That’s the story. That’s Stringer and Avon too. Power. Respect. Juice. How far will you go to get it? It’s the oldest story. The deed of Cain was multiplied a thousand times. The apple wasn’t the original sin. It was that brother-on-brother murder. (Also he samples John Huston’s crazy 1960s Bible movie and The Robe on this, what could be better.)
Righteous offerings remain in aim — they rejected like grains of Cain. Remember why he kills Abel: because God favors Abel’s fat calf over his harvest. It’s jealousy, but it’s a moment of anger taken too far. For that, he and his descendants are cursed for eternity. How many are doing lifetime bids for a flash second of rage? (And don’t forget that old school white supremacy nonsense that people of color are the descendants of Cain…) Is Ka saying he’s Cain or Abel? Jacob or Esau — robbed of his birthright, that career and record deal? Is he the blessed one or the cursed one? Both those stories are about how, in one key instant, fate is sealed for a lifetime and for generations onward, with no way to redeem it or a second chance.
I think a lot about Abraham on Mount Moriah, ready to sacrifice his son. What kind of God asks for this? What kind of God fucks with Job like that, just to settle a bet with the Devil? What kind of God lets us stumble through Sodom and Gomorrah? What kind of strength to you need to rise up to that?
Flipping two albums from the Old and the New Testaments (I once tried to do this in mixtape form) is a flex, but The Thief Next To Jesus climbs entirely different hills, especially the one called Golgotha. Thoughts that mustered like the mustard seed. The gospel samples and loops remind us he’s always been more blues than rhythm, Rap Game Robert Johnson: if I had possession over Judgement Day.
The struggle for faith and questioning God, questioning the Church — it’s Keitel trying to burn away his sins with his fingers in the flames in Mean Streets, redemption desired but denied: The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand, the kind you can feel in your heart.
More explicitly than any of his other themed albums, Ka is wrestling with the church and its long, complicated history as part of Black life: as an imposed tool of the slavemaster, as a justification for centuries of oppression and racial violence, the hypocrisy and denial; but also Black churches as places of solace and support, for forbearance and promises of deliverance. Is knowing God is always watching a comfort or a threat? Is it protection or surveillance? Something imposed on Black life and culture, or something taken and adapted?
James Baldwin wrestled with this too — he was a teenage preacher, raised strict Pentecostal, and eventually leaving was the defining turning point in his life. He covers it in full in the novel Go Tell It On The Mountain but also his essay “Letter From A Region In My Mind.” In that, Baldwin covers how the church was, for him, a sanctuary against all the dangers of Harlem — the pimps, the gangs, the white cops. The uplift and the haven of it; the stifling and the strictures of it. And just like every young Black man, he realized there were like Ka said on that early Nightbreed joint: Two roads out the ghetto: success or death. Time to choose. But for him, the mic was at the pulpit:
Every Negro boy — in my situation during those years, at least — who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a “thing,” a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is. It was this last realization that terrified me and — since it revealed that the door opened on so many dangers — helped to hurl me into the church.
It’s later that Baldwin turns away from the church, but these two works dig deep into the paradoxes and the conflicts. Ka similarly turns the facets: “Beautiful” is a hymn, a prayer of hope for everyone; “Collection Plate” a cynical callout of tithing people in subsistence poverty. But who is the “God Undefeated” who sides with the winners? On “True Holy Water,” is he really comparing his own struggles to bring you his work to something Christlike: I’m here for you, sweat, bled and shed a tear for you? It’s a much more complicated and direct record than its predecessors, unveiling Ka’s bitterness:
Ain’t nothing shook about me but my faith
Couple hundred years asking, nothing kept us safe
Ain’t nothing shook about me but my faith
Still do us the same, we’re in the same place
Ka is always looking for forgiveness, salvation, so I wonder which thief he sees himself as, or it’s his struggle with moral duality again. Because there were two thieves crucified next to Jesus. And they were called Dismas and Gestas.
Now as they hung there, waiting to die slowly and painfully, Gestas said: “Ayo Jesus, aren’t you the Messiah? Get us up out of here.” But Dismas said: “Nah son chill. We’re paying the ends for what we did. But this mans didn’t do nothing. But hey Jesus, holla at me when you get to Heaven.” And Jesus answered, “I got you fam. You’re in.” (Luke 23:49–43, King Tee Version)
The thing is though, Dismas and Gestas weren’t petty thieves. In ancient Rome, a thief was sentenced to pay back four times the value of what they’d stolen — crucifixion was a rare and severe punishment. It was roving bandits who were crucified; Rome had a serious bandido problem, it was a leading cause of death. Except some of these bandits weren’t robbers, they were guerillas fighting Rome—terrorists, freedom fighters. Many translations have Dismas and Gestas as “revolutionaries” or “rebels.” And it’s possible they, like Jesus, were Jews revolting against Roman rule. I plan my death before I plan submission.
The point of the story is supposed to be: repent and accept your Lord and Savior; even at the very last minute if you accept Jesus you’ll go to heaven. Can’t afford to have one wasted or fall through. But Gestas (which means “deeds” in Latin) isn’t just impenitent. He’s saying: promises of the next world are not enough. Faith is not enough. We need saving here, now. This is where the suffering and injustice is. Many disciples beating their Bibles. Jesus, we need leaders with rifles.
Cold Facts
The irony, or tragedy, or gift, or paradox of Ka is: without all those years in the wilderness, he wouldn’t be as great now. He needed to go through all that to give us what he’s giving us. If Natural Elements had jumped off a bit, he’d be another ’90s rapper doing backpack reunion tours, trying to keep that played out sound playing.
Ka’s aphoristic flips scroll by, embedded and etched on the city, like Jenny Holzer’s Times Square installations, reflected in a rain-wet yellow cab windshield. Framed a shattered life, the forfeits and the pain. All the saddest sights, the coffins and the stains.
Scorcese called the overhead shots in Taxi Driver ‘sacramental perspective.’ Ka does those, moving down from on high with virtuouso tracking shots through subways into elevators crazy wet with piss. These are dark back blocks, shortie. How I wore these mismatched socks. Still avoid chocolate sprinkles, looks too similar to what the rat drops.
He takes rap’s entire history of street tales and boils it down to a rust-dark sea that fits in a 40 oz. bottle. The harmony dreaming had me constantly scheming. Rarely peace, in belly of beast, armed like a demon. These are epics of whispered forbearance and suffering, gravelly gravitas. I need more prayer to stay out the crosshair. He’s so internalized, everyone else is briefly glimpsed, in passing, rarely named — this girl, my man, you fools. They’re all weighty figures, symbolic and anonymous, like Kerry James Marshall paintings.
No doubt the world Ka gives us is bleak, unrelenting — there is only the city, the man, and the struggle. But if these are variations on a Brownsville The Grey where Ka is solo punching the wolves with broken glass, well, it’s a cold world out there. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting a little frosty myself. But the hope comes from how we rise up against it; most records have a celebratory joint — “Children,” “Summer,” “I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev),” “Off The Record” — as Chuck D said, hard times get me down I pump the hard rhymer. The music is where the salvation lies. The world ground on him and he grinds back.
It’s now sixteen years since Iron Works, and eleven albums…it was ten years between Nightbreed and Works. The career has been way longer than the exile. He’s not done yet:
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 forty year old man right now. Maybe it is art and helping people through it. Until I find out it is gonna be this.
Postscript
Ka suddenly passed away on October 12th 2024, about a month after I finished this piece — so it is still in the present tense, and I don’t have the heart yet to change it. This was only two weeks after his pop-up shop for The Thief Next to Jesus. He looks happy, healthy and fulfilled. A cause of death has not yet been made public, and it’s not really our business.
There was a section of this piece I didn’t finish or include, and now I’m not sure whether to: about how often Ka obsessed over and brooded on the shadow of his death, just as Yukio Mishima artistically rehearsed his, over and over in the years leading up to his suicide. Maybe that’s for another time.
The tragedy and loss is still being processed by all his fans, family and friends. What’s devastating in part has been the number of people saying how much love, support and respect he gave privately and over the course of years, and how much his music meant — deeply, spiritually, profoundly — to so many listeners.
There are too many dead rappers, yet rarely do we lose one who is at the height of their powers and also having a late in life run. It is hard to process that in a year or two he won’t suddenly appear with another hand-crafted album. Of the many great eulogies that have been written so far, I keep coming back to two — one is what billy woods wrote in the Backwoodz newsletter:
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. Not the technical precision, the atmospheric production, or the weaving dance of simile and metaphor. Certainly not the grim circumstances he often described; we have heard those before, and some of us have lived them. What set Ka apart was the heart. And for those who make that sacrifice, it is in the hope that someone, somewhere, will understand, will feel, will be moved. In that Ka surely succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
The other is something Ka said to Impose about enjoying life around 2013:
It’s gonna sound real corny, but it’s just living. I’ve been around way too much death and I know that living is better. 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.
This image sticks with me strongly: all of Ka’s videos are in black and white, his musical world is monochrome, weighed in greyscale. Here, we have this thumbprint of color, this kite, against the brilliant blue of the sky, and below, this man, smiling to himself.
