Grief Pedigree: I Hope They Find Ka

Imaga via Ka/Instagram

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Jaap van der Doelen spends his Sundays drinking espresso and revisiting Cuban Linx II.

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There’s a special kind of magic to rapping fluidly around a vocal sample. On “Beautiful,” the second track on The Thief Next To Jesus, the excellent album Ka dropped earlier this year—and which sadly now serves as his swan song—the Brownsville rapper weaves around that titular word as if swimming through an Olympic pool of dread. As any album by Ka, Thief is meticulously crafted, at times so densely packed that it could be intimidating to the uninitiated.

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Sometimes the road in needs to be a little shorter. Take “A Cure for the Common,” his collaboration with the producer Preservation from the latter’s 2020 album Eastern Medicine, Western Illness. Or rather, take the track’s razor-sharp opening, which runs just under a minute. Preservation created the album paying tribute to Hong Kong, a city he lived in for several years. His chop of a woman languorously singing “Ka…,” we find the rapper dropping stabs of supreme eloquence between its repetition.

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There’s a line juxtaposing those who speak well of him with those who speak ill, hinting at how he plays with ideas of (dis)honor and (dis)loyalty on a Homeric scale. There are references to demons and divinity, showcasing his proclivity for invoking religious imagery in his poetry, and the way one can doubt and wrestle with all that entails. And there are boasts of how good a rapper he is, verbalized in a manner that immediately proves its point. All within ten perfect bars, and around fifty seconds time.

“Been conditioned to sound ill, but this is Brownsville” he caps it off, making the way the sample completes his full rap moniker—“Ka…”—a double entendre: you could easily read the line sans “Ka,” and understand the ‘this’ as referring to Brownsville, the environment that conditioned him. The “but,” however, implies a juxtaposition. That ties in with reading the line without ending the sentence at ‘Brownsville’. The man named Brownsville Ka might be conditioned by his surroundings, but perhaps he already had all this illness in him to begin with. By repeating the last part a couple times, we are nudged ever closer to that second reading.

It is impossible to distill a writer like Ka down to ten lines. But in the overture to “Cure,” he somehow manages to create a microcosm of his whole discography. And what a discography that is.

It is an unfortunate likelihood that Ka’s death will bring a lot more attention to his art than he found in life. What makes that somewhat easier to digest is that Ka himself already made peace with this years ago. “Van Gogh, he wasn’t revered, he cut his ear off and killed himself later on”, he told Julian Brimmers in a conversation for this very site almost a decade earlier. “That man wasn’t known until years after his death – he needed to have known what he was during the time he was alive.”

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