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You read Santiago Cembrano and remember why you love rap.
It starts with a barely audible promise. “It’s the saga / Put you through the epic right here,” Ka whispers before launching into the first verse of “D.N.A.,” the opening track on his debut album, 2008’s Iron Works. Over the course of 17 years and 11 albums, he did exactly that; his body of work —violent, tragic, and singular not only in hip-hop but in contemporary literature— is epic, composed of epos and heroic poems where survivors can also be villains.
Ka passed away on October 12th at the age of 52. He was from Brownsville, Brooklyn—a rough territory home to gritty MCs like Sean Price and Smoothe Da Hustler—and it was clear without asking. It wasn’t just part of his social media handle; it was almost like his full artistic name, a badge of honor. Brownsville Ka. Heroin flowed through those blocks in the ’70s, when addicts shared their candy with little Kaseem. The crack epidemic hit the following decade, filling the home he shared with more than a dozen relatives with both dealers and users. Outside, violence was rampant, and Ka quickly found himself caught up in it. That’s the corner of the world he captured in his music, a no man’s land, resisting gentrification to this day. His verses stem from the deep wound those years left in him.
Brownsville is the root. In “Conflicted,” Ka meditates on a childhood stripped of innocence by the conflicting advice of his parents, trapped between active and passive forms of survival, the only thing that mattered: “Mommy told me: ‘Be a good boy / Need you alive, please survive, you my hood joy’ / Pops told me: ‘Stay strapped, son / You need the shotty, be a body or catch one’ / Always been conflicted.” This track kicks off Honor Killed The Samurai (2016); but before Ka even raps, we hear a woman recite a passage from Bushido, Inazo Nitobe’s book characterizing Japan through the moral code of its warriors.
Some songs open with fragments from Bushido, acting like epigraphs that expand the meaning of the text, making it polyphonic. We hear about how music eased the harshness of the samurais’ brutal lives, about how they learned to kill and die by their code of honor and about their thirst for knowledge. Ka responds with vignettes tinged with hunger and blood, where he did what had to be done to get what he needed. As the album unfolds, the two worlds blur, as if Ka were roaming Japanese plains with a sword at his waist while Honda Tadakatsu or Miyamoto Musashi spent their nights peddling crack in Giuliani’s New York.
From the title—a great verse in itself—we know the end: adhering to their principles costs these warriors their lives, but their death is dignified. In that honorable sacrifice, Ka finds a reciprocation of his own convictions, establishing a dialogue with a foreign society that, in many ways, mirrors his own. This was neither the first nor the last time Ka drew metaphors from other eras and empires. As an adult he turned to books to make up for the indifference with which he had sat in classrooms, with a gun in his backpack.
Since the ‘90s, when he rapped with the groups Natural Elements and Nightbreed, he had Dr. Yen Lo from The Manchurian Candidate —Richard Condon’s controversial 1959 sci-fi thriller, banned for a quarter of a century after Kennedy’s assassination—pinned as a character he wanted to build on. The opportunity came when he met producer Preservation, with whom he formed Dr. Yen Lo. Their sole album, 2015’s Days With Dr. Yen Lo, emerged from this partnership. But these aren’t traditional concept albums—there are no seppukus, and the Cold War doesn’t make an appearance. Instead, they recontextualize Ka’s verses. It’s a subtle but potent gesture: these references extend his lyrics far beyond Brownsville. Every title, every sample, every interpolation allowed Ka to break through time and space, widening his lens.
Beyond crafting some of the most beautiful verses in rap —Ka was an artist who cared deeply about beauty as a fundamental quality of his work, sometimes spending years editing his rhymes until no syllable could be cut, honing them to lethal precision— he was also one of the leaders who redefined the sound of rap in the early 2010s by stripping away the booming drum loops that often drowned out his voice. Over half of his albums were self-produced; like Roc Marciano, his close friend and collaborator, Ka designed the palette for the canvases only he could paint. Even so, when collaborating with a producer, as he did with Preservation, Ka preferred to create full, cohesive works, returning to the MC/producer albums he grew up with before Illmatic rewrote the rules. Los Angeles-based producer Animoss was chosen to craft the beats for 2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens, which they released as Hermit and the Recluse.
Wild beasts would calm at the sound of Orpheus’ lyre, the poet-son of Apollo who ventured into the sea, knowing nothing of it, and overcame the seductive songs of the sirens with one of his own. While Honor Killed The Samurai explored the clash between morality and the incentives to ignore it, Ka turned to classical Greece in Orpheus to touch on temptation and how to resist it; in both cases, it was a matter of life and death, and also of what kind of life, what kind of death. Orpheus is the album that most fully embraces its suggested metaphor: in “Sirens,” Ka walks through the Minotaur’s labyrinth, marked by the tracks of harpies and cyclopes, of the Erinyes and Cerberus, dodging both the mythical sirens and the wailing of police sirens—both of whose songs could entrap him. His burden is as heavy as that of “Atlas,” he confronts death in “Hades,” and finds a parallel to his own journey in “The Punishment of Sisyphus.” Greek mythology is rich, offering plenty of lakes in which he can see his own face. The treasure hunt he stages in “Golden Fleece” is fierce and voracious, and that’s why he sometimes lets a bullet fly to protect his mother. There’s a sequence in this song that strikes me with its clarity and simplicity: “I want compassion from the highest / Food for the lowest / Cures for the afflicted / Roofs for the homeless / Direction for the misled / Heat for the coldest / Love for the lonely / Peace for the soldiers.”
Like Homer with classical Greece, like the troubadours and bards who carefully etched their stories into the fabric of history, Ka transformed his personal pain into something universal, resistant to a thousand winters, as he recounted the horrors he had seen, suffered, and committed. It’s as if he had truly been on that ship with Orpheus: his deep voice sounds ancient, as promises from a parchment untouched for centuries. In return, he found that universal suffering whispered to him that he wasn’t alone, that long ago, when mountains and rivers were still young, before gunpowder or cocaine, someone else had felt what he would later feel, and wrote down their secrets to remember that even then, he was still alive. “It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming,” said Canadian poet Anne Carson of her encounter with classical Greece, which she first explored in high school through the poems of Sappho. Carson would later write her way back into that time to contain otherwise unbearable experiences.
Among the central themes in Ka’s work is his meditation on inheritance—what we receive from our ancestors: how it opens up certain possibilities while closing off others. He presents these thoughts in Descendants of Cain, a journey into the Old Testament to search for the origins of violence, that original sin. “All our Santas carried them hammers / Our guidance counselors was talented scramblers / Spiritual leaders, ran a number hold / Tycoons moved in vests, and kept a money roll,” he raps in “Patron Saints.” He knew nothing else; his response was to mimic what he learned. “From the ‘Ville, still payin’ for the sins of my father,” he insists in the chorus of “Sins of the Father.” As the title suggests, he traces the origin to Cain’s fratricide against Abel; he alludes to this in “Solitude of Enoch,” recalling a time when he almost killed his cousin before his sister intervened. These aren’t distant anecdotes; he embodies the episodes he raps about.
“You can tell I’m in fact a native / I live this vivid shit, I ain’t that creative,” he clarifies in “Land of Nod,” as he asks God to drop the mysteries: the Devil is winning the battle. Though millennia apart, Ka’s Brownsville and the Old Testament merge in “Old Justice,” because those same ancient rules from back then—eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—governed his life for years. Is it what remains constant that makes us human?
Ka admits he’s seen too much for his faith to be unshakable. He repeats it in “Fragile Faith” from The Thief Next to Jesus, his last album, released just a couple of months before his death. The title invokes an image we all know, but shifts perspective to focus on the other two men crucified, the ones not seen on stamps. It’s no coincidence that in Samurai and Orpheus, Ka seems to identify with his references, while in the albums with religious frameworks, his stance is critical—even if he doesn’t say it outright and prefers to let a quote speak for him. In the intro of “Cross Your Bear,” a voice that isn’t his states that the church was complicit in slavery, segregation, and lynchings. Temporal discrepancies collapse here in another way, as Ka analyzes how his people were tortured on the foundations of this religion. That’s why he couldn’t be Jesus. That’s why in “Hymn and I,” he once again asks Jesus to give their leaders weapons.
That’s why, it seems to me, Ka sacrifices himself in “Holy Water,” the final track of the album—and ultimately, of his career: “I’m here for you, sweat, bled and shed a tear for you.” The “you” hangs in the air; it could be anyone who listens to the song, anyone who needs it.
Italian writer Italo Calvino explains that a classic bears the imprint of the readings that preceded ours, leaving behind the marks it has left on language, customs, and the cultures it has crossed. In a way, we are surprised when we approach a classic, not because it teaches us something we didn’t know, but because it illuminates what we already knew without knowing where it came from. A classic, Calvino proposes, never finishes saying what it has to say. Ka draws on the classics to write elegies that look back and lament all that was taken from him. His work is autobiographical, not just for himself, but for those who ran through Brownsville’s alleyways with him, for the kids he grew up with who never came of age, for the children who grew up to become gunmen who killed other children. But he doesn’t stop there.
Hip-hop thrives in the tension between the local and the global, in those particular experiences that reflect what happens in other corners of the world, where different languages are spoken, and other colors are worn. Sick Jacken once said, in Spanish, that the world is a hood, and summed it up well: each MC narrates what makes their own unique, and in doing so, creates an echo that resonates in all the others. With his epic poems, Ka takes this tension between the local and the global and amplifies it. His reach is so vast when he opens his arms, it embraces all of humanity. That’s the power of intertextuality, of different frameworks of reference. Ka’s rap is simple—it’s about poor kids, quick deals, sales made in secret, about what you can take and what you can protect. And yet.
Honor Killed The Samurai ends with “I Wish (Death Poem).” That woman’s voice had already told us that samurais, during their travels, would sometimes stop, pull out the writing tools they kept in their belts, and compose an ode. That’s how the song begins, but in Bushido the passage continues: those odes were later found in the helmets or breastplates that were removed from the lifeless bodies of the samurai. Ka remembers how invincible he felt when he plunged into the cruel speed of the streets in “I Wish.” This is the poem we would have found next to his body, where he also admits that he prayed for a new life as he blew out his birthday candles each year. And he made it happen, this ode and hundreds more broke the curse he had inherited.
The traumas that tormented him, that he narrated and eased with his verses, never completely disappeared. But thanks to these songs, one distant day, in a country that doesn’t yet have a name, someone will understand that there were warriors in Brownsville too, warriors who fought with honor against the destiny they were given, warriors who suffered the same pain. And then, that someone will be able to tell their story.
