Ka: No Breaks Needed

On a February weekend back in 2012, Ka was battling the brutal winter as he stood outside the building that was once home to the Fat Beats record store on 6th Avenue in Manhattan. The rapper was attempting to sell copies of an album he’d recorded and pressed up. He called it Grief Pedigree.

“After a couple of hours I was questioning my whole rap existence standing out on that lonely corner,” he says now. “I didn’t go gold that day, put it like that.” But he did connect with a few fans who came out. One of those troopers was Preservation, who happened to be a producer and tour DJ for Mos Def; he told Ka how Mos had been talking about his music. It was the boost Ka needed: “As an MC in a very fragile state, that’s what you want to hear to prove you didn’t make a mistake.”

Since that moment, Ka has steadily amassed a faithful cult following. Fans talk about his music in revered tones, and album releases are accompanied by pilgrimages to meet the man, shake his hand, and buy his music in person. For 2013’s The Night’s Gambit, he posted up outside the Fat Beats location again. This time, I saw married couples tell him how they play his music for their two-year old child every day, and aspiring artists struggling with writer’s block showing him their rhymes in tattered notebooks.

This sort of success is coming at an odd time for Ka. He’s a veteran, “40-something” rapper who grew up while Mr. Magic and Red Alert ruled the airwaves. He didn’t start to focus on writing until the ’90s, though, buoyed by seeing Smoothe da Hustler and Trigga tha Gambler – who lived a block away in Brownsville – score a hit with the rugged slang treatise “Broken Language” in 1995.

By this point, Ka had become active on New York City’s open mic scene. He remembers seeing The Notorious B.I.G. performing at the Lyricist Lounge. (He raised his hand when Puff Daddy asked if anyone wanted to battle Big, and now laughs with relief as he recalls how some other sacrificial MC was instead ushered to the stage.) He joined the group Natural Elements and with industry A&R man Dante Ross’s help almost secured a development deal with Def Jam. But after that opportunity fell through, Ka decided to leave the crew  –  just before they eventually signed to Tommy Boy. By then he’d teamed up with an old friend called Kev to record as Nightbreed. The duo’s “2 Roads out the Ghetto” 12-inch, independently released in 1998, floundered.

He retreated back into civilian life, scoring a day job that he’s cagey to talk about even now. “You can ask about it, but I’m not sure I’ll answer it,” he says when the topic is raised. It was against this safety net of regular paychecks that Ka eventually decided to begin writing music again. After nearly a decade, he emerged with 2008’s self-released Iron Works album. This time serendipity was on his side, as the project found its way to the ears of the Wu-Tang Clan’s GZA, who invited him to record on his Pro Tools album that same year. The confidence that cosign brought was eventually channeled into writing and recording Grief Pedigree, released four years later.

Sonically, Grief Pedigree may be his most accessible project  – tracks like “No Downtime” and “Decisions” are sweetened with soul samples  – but since then he’s been blazing an uncompromising trail that is content to do away with the drums and breaks that are often held up as the heartbeat of hip hop. Ka is unapologetic about the development. “Sometimes when you have a back-beat and it’s being so prominent on the track, it drains me personally ‘cause I’ve heard it already,” he says. “I’ve been listening to the art my whole life. I felt like I wanted to bring something else.”

A pause, then he adds: “I’m not anti-drums  –  I know drums that can bring up that feeling and that spirit in your soul when they kick  –  but every now and then every track don’t need those powerful drums to put your point across. I know it puts some people off; I know some people even question if what I do is hip hop because of the lack of drums. But to me, I think it’s beautiful.”

Ka calls it “sit down, cold weather, dark night music and moody shit,” and the meticulous rhymes match. He comes across like he’s delivering a hushed sermon as he balances flashbacks and regrets about his past digressions on the streets of Brownsville with spiritual pleas for forgiveness, acceptance, or some hazy area in-between. On his new album, Days with Dr. Yen Lo, he drops the steely declaration, “My flip book is a strict look at the shaky grounds where no kid’s shook,” and spits about how you “can’t have an iron heart and a glass chin.” But then comes the confessional: “The fact I’m still here, it’s clear it’s divine purpose/ I know Lord, I can’t afford another mis-step.”

Delivered in Ka’s husky voice, these street scriptures are presented loud in the mix so that his words commandeer the listening experience. It’s a sonic tactic he justifies with a love of lyrics: “I take too much time with these rhymes for them to go unheard.”

Ka estimates that Days With Dr. Yen Lo took around two years to make. “It’s hard as fuck, man,” he says when asked about the toll his hands-on and perfectionist approach to crafting music can have. “I don’t really have a lot of free time. Shooting videos, editing videos, digging for records for a year in order to get 15 beats that are even appropriate enough to rhyme on, then spending the time with the rhymes where it can take two months to write a verse. I sacrifice time from my family  –  and luckily they know it’s a passion of mine and I’d be going crazy if I wasn’t doing it  –  but now that I’ve done it so many times, I don’t see another way of doing it. Every time I start [an album], I just know what’s ahead of me. It’s like a boxer training for a fight  –  can’t eat, can’t have sex!  –  but I love it.”

This time around, he worked with Preservation – the Mos Def producer he met in 2012. The duo struck up a friendship back then, and it slowly evolved into a collaboration. Ka says this is how he always works. Creating songs is a personal process and one that cannot be done “over the computer.” (That’s also why you’ll rarely, if ever, hear Ka featuring as a guest on other artists’ tracks.)

Preservation was an ideal match for Ka’s aesthetic. “I’ve been making tracks with no drum programming since I heard Ghostface’s ‘260’ [from 1996] so it wasn’t that new to me,” Pres explains. “Most MCs wanted drums to be added or to just use those tracks as interludes, so I left that way of doing tracks for a while, but Ka brought my thinking back to that raw essence. I learned a lot from his process of selecting music, to use space and quiet to create movement on a track.”

Ka has a day job to factor in to all of this , although the way he tells it those duties help ground his art. “If I didn’t have a job I probably would get more done, but then I wouldn’t be able to finance it,” he says. “It’s pros and cons. If I didn’t have a job I’d have to compromise my art to get a record deal.”

He’s self-aware to know to his music “ain’t no mass appeal shit.” Despite the critical acclaim his last two albums have received, he’s yet to hear from any labels wanting to sign him. But he seems content with his outsider’s status. “The radio gives you its views and they leave out a lot of colors… It’s different than how I remember it. With shows like Mr. Magic and Red Alert, they played it all from the commercial to the underground and it was dope; then after them came Bobbito [Garcia] and Stretch [Armstrong], even the Underground Railroad with Jay Smooth. You were always able to find a dope spectrum of the art. Now you get that one color on the radio predominantly.” He pauses. “It’s funny when I hear about ‘the home of hip hop’ and it’s like, I guess I don’t live at its home.”

Instead, Ka has created his own space. For the release of Days With Dr. Len Yo, he again picked a record store to launch his album – this time Other Music in the East Village. The weather was temperate. Fans and peers duly made the journey to show their support. “I’ll always stand outside and peddle the art,” he says. “But this time it’s me and Pres.”