ka rapper

“Just because you cook doesn’t mean you’re a chef.” But eventually, it came out. Ka epitomized quality music and superb lyricism with his self produced albums.

“Ka should be celebrated as a New York treasure,” the rapper El-P wrote in a supportive tweet, adding, “Before writing a hit piece it’s good to ask yourself: ‘Has the man I’m trying to destroy saved more lives than me?’”. Especially in the ’70s and ’80s.”, “In the ’70s, the community raised you,” Ka continues. Dark T-shirt, no logo, and khaki shorts. I loved him from before that but I loved him forever after that. People was hitting you with a buck fifty on your face, just for nothing,” he says, referring to a slashing requiring a great number of stitches. In 2008, he was re-introduced on Gza's album Pro Tools on the song "Firehouse" and in that same year he released his debut album Iron Works. Ka hasn’t slowed down since. Early model Motorola phones the size your head. Spliff Star, who they used to play dice with. “I was leery of introducing her to it: everybody and their mother rhymes,” he says. “You how some people join the military and it gives them structure? Apart from music, they’d built a life together. 14.3k Followers, 0 Following, 400 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Ka (@brownsvilleka) On “$,” the song where he questions how many cars one man can drive, he also raps: “Watch me blueprint rec centers/I’m trying to inspire.” So much of his past, his worldview, his creative style is packaged into that one couplet, be it the deserted Brooklyn of his youth, his unerring loyalty, his economy of language. As a writer, it’s you and your pen and paper, with no one around, in silence. He’s drawn to the arts that require precision, he explained, like calligraphy—“or samurai.”. If not for Fresh Air Fund, I’d have died in the smog, Ka raps on 2016 track “That Cold and Lonely,” referencing a non-profit that pays for vacations in the country for low-income inner city youth. Underneath its canvas roof, cushions cover wicker furniture. “When you struggling so much, you want to tell someone. We was in the basement one day, we put it on and we went at it!” Suddenly, time is fluid, slipping backward, and the cousins start speaking a different language. Ka is a 44-year-old fire captain from Brownsville. Standing next to his black 2005 Honda Accord, Ka is dressed so plainly that it is easy to mistake him for a neighbor taking out the trash or grabbing the mail. The comedian, worth nearly a billion dollars, could retire with his family to a private beach somewhere; if he wanted to chase some grand artistic dreams, he could surely land an unlimited budget from any number of movie studios.

“You step out in the street and [your neighbor] would tell your mother.” Things changed with the arrival of crack cocaine. “There was dudes that was smarter than me,” he says. The small, basement-level space is tiled and bright, gleaming white. Never relying on trending producers or hot themes, Ka simply laid poetry down over ill chops and dusty grooves while painting pictures of the Brownsville era. “We old niggas, b!” Ka says. Wizened by decades of surviving the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Brownsville, Ka stands in stark contrast to this current trend. It’s a test to take, I’m going to study hard — eight, nine hours a day — so that I can move up and I can be a man of worth in this shit and respected in this field, and provide for my family and have my people proud of me. “The smaller something is, the harder it is to make,” Seinfeld said,  gushing over the careful click of a closing door from one of the “few dozen” Porsches he owns. It’s the sort of line that unlocks whole sections of an artist’s psyche for the audience, all in fewer than ten words. He would bang on cars for beats — the same cars that they sometimes jumped up onto in order to evade the neighborhood’s packs of wild, rabies-ridden dogs. In the early ’90s, Ka made a name for himself around New York with a group, Natural Elements, and later as half of the duo Nightbreed. After the radio show stints, record labels took interest in the crew. Most of the Kama Sutra releases are pressed on styrene Reply Notify me Helpful [m204629] Master Release. In 1989, Dion gave Ka a thousand dollars to jumpstart his music career. The cousins were coming into their own as emcees during a storied era for New York rap, and La proudly runs down the genealogy of Brooklyn legends he and Ka are supposedly connected to. Nas, who La drove around while working for a limo company (he was a bad tipper). As he says earlier on the song, “Could battle hard against catalogs with one leaflet journal.”. This was in that same context, so I appreciate and I love the shit. “But real talk, I was on fire after that.”. I caught the ringworms on that block. “I didn’t do well in school because when the teachers was talking, rhymes was coming into my head and I couldn’t fucking focus,” he says. “I record very different from a lot people,” he says. They started getting some traction after doing freestyle sessions on the legendary radio show Stretch and Bobbito — it was actually in that same studio where Ka first met Mimi Valdes, who is now his wife, escorting guests up to the booth. These days, he’s something of a self-identified foodie. Ka blamed himself. I was just tryna not be a 30-year-old rapper.”, Leaving his art behind wasn’t so simple, though, and after two years of silence Ka decided to pick rapping back up. After we finish our veggie burgers, we head home to Brooklyn. I help myself to some of the lemon cucumber infused water sitting in a giant carafe on the counter. I never did that before. He is basically a one-man enterprise, single-handedly mailing out his own CDs and records, finding his own beats to sample, and working with one engineer to put out his work. The toxic smell of smoke would suffocate the area. People don’t understand that.
There’s a speaker playing adult contemporary radio oldies. His father was locked up until Ka was “maybe 6 years old,” he says, but after that, both of his parents were around, trying to keep life calm as possible for him and his little sister. “When we was 8 or 9 years old we was recording. Who else has done that?”. “Before we ran the street, the dogs ran the street!” Ka says, dissolving into laughter.
His standard of living, while not flashy as far as rappers go, is far from the poverty he lived through as a kid. “I have a long road ahead of me, and I’m going to continue to do my art. La rhymed, and before little Ka followed in his footsteps, he provided percussion. “Where you going right now to get your coffee from was crazy, yo! By now, Ka’s story is well-worn—the Golden Age also-ran who walked away then, when the itch came back, locked himself in a bedroom until all the swords were sharp. “Hull Street was my block. Ka has moved around New York — he currently lives in Windsor Terrace — but Brownsville is his home. Chris Pummill, his engineer, jokes that Ka has never been up to the roof, easily the building’s best feature, because he is so laser-focused when he works. He hasn’t had chicken or steak in more than 10 years. He counts Rakim and KRS-One amongst his biggest mainstream influences, though he says he’s been inspired by “a thousand MCs.” Ka’s stylistic signature is old school: a minimal, repetitive production and depressingly incisive rhymes. Halfway through his brief, brilliant new album, Ka sneers: “How many cars you need?” With *Honor Killed the Samurai, *the Brownsville craftsman cements himself as one of this generation’s preeminent stylists, his voice hushed but vicious, his production a grim rabbit hole of found sounds, minor keys, and very few drums. See the passage on “That Cold and Lonely” where he raps, “With no clear winner, still appeared thinner/Don’t howl like I’m holier than thou, I’m a mere sinner/Wasn’t blessed to be resting in the ‘burbs/I was stressing, wrestling with the scourge.” That could be an origin story or a sad denouement; either way, he “tried years for these ideas to gestate.” On “Finer Things/Tamahagene,” the vocal layering is both well suited to fill out the mix and mimics someone’s own paranoid self-doubt. Ka is an emcee I will support and purchase albums from without even hearing a preview. I was like 14. Mimi and Ka officially got together the same year he quit rapping, and at first he kept his aspirations a secret. I had a lot of weight on my shoulders,” he says. Now he’s arrived at its core, where each syllable is purposeful and every piano key is in its right place. As hip-hop beats get progressively more crushing, Ka’s drums dissipate to the point of nonexistence. The irony of Samurai’s title is that, while the window dressing recalls feudal Japan, you rarely have to look back further than Giuliani’s New York to see the kinds of fiercely fought, morally fraught battles that rage in the background. Pitchfork is the most trusted voice in music. Add all to Wantlist Remove all from Wantlist. That’s why I take so much time with my shit, I know that the people I was around was some of the best MCs.

It didn’t come our way, for whatever reason. “I wanted to be better, [but] I was the weak one in the group.” He quit Natural Elements, and soon after the group was signed to Tommy Boy. And yet the genius of Ka’s music is that the form follows function. La grew up around the same desperation as Ka. You become accustomed to being in your head, and it’s lonely sometimes. “FLAME THROWER: FDNY captain moonlights as anti-cop rapper.”, on the legendary radio show Stretch and Bobbito. Ka recommends the house veggie burger and announces he is treating me. “That’s how wack I was: as soon as I left they got a record deal,” Ka says. His voice is flat, gravelly but zoned out, like he’s trying not to directly confront the reality he describes. “Hip-hop is a genre that is very ageist, and it was a hard reality to come to grips with.” But he’s here now, and he’s got no plans to slow down. Brought together in 1993 by the Bronx-based producer Charlemagne and signed to his label, Fortress, the crew was comprised of L-Swift (now Swigga), Mr. Voodoo, and Ka — others joined and eventually left the group, including G-Blass, Howie Smalls, and the InTimidator. But more importantly, Ka wrings his hands over fulfilling his vast potential: “They say it’s royal in my blood*.*”. Sitting down in a firehouse and eating at a table with a bunch of brothers? A 2013 NPR review described his music as “steel poetry,” and the label fits. He also practices good skincare: earlier, he draped a bandanna over his shaved head to protect from the sun beating down on it. “She was the first one to put Lil Wayne on the cover; this woman knows hip-hop. “The struggle is why we rap,” La says. With each new project, Ka hops in his car and personally drops off CDs for his cousins and friends; the drive is somewhat of a ritual at this point. So for her to say: ‘Yo, no, you good,’ it was like, ‘Word? Def Jam invited them up to their offices, and there was talk of a deal.

“Some bullshit in the papers,” his cousin says, and they get right back to chopping it up. In the backyard in August, and across a series of follow-up interviews, Ka is adamant in his refusal to comment about the hit piece. Because no matter how the borough shifts around him, he’s somewhere in a dark room, working and re-working the details until he gets it just right.

It was the first time I heard that,” Ka says. Why did my family have to be here in this place?”. “This ain’t just for me,” Ka says.

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