Imaga via Ka/Website
Michael McKinney understands the cultural importance of Kreayshawn’s “Gucci Gucci.”
To listen to hip-hop is to commune with ghosts. This has always been true, of course—for all the forms the genre has taken over the years, it is rooted in things long gone: instrumentals ripped from demolished studios, voices pulled from the ether, idioms passed down so many times that they have taken on new meanings several times over. It is a music of the now—of car stereos and dropped tops, of nightclubs and street corners—but, critically, it is locked in an unending dialogue with its own timelines.
Kaseem Ryan, a.k.a. Ka, a beloved member of New York’s hip-hop underground, understood this. In his music, he looked towards all manners of histories, treating the past not as a bygone object but as a lived reality. The difference between the Brooklyn of 2024, the Queens of the ‘90s, and the Jerusalem of 0 A.D. is little more than a changing architecture; the Atlantic Ocean and the Baltic Sea are, ultimately, the same waters. This is implicit in plenty of music, but Ka—a careful writer who habitually leapt between universes in just a few words—spent his career chasing that particular kind of eternity, collapsing geographies in the pursuit of the kind of wisdom that, eventually, becomes generational.
It is tempting to think of Ka’s work as a hermetic thing. His music certainly allows for that reading: he rarely raised his voice above a mutter, and he preferred strikingly minimal beats, turning down the drums and focusing instead on creaking ambiance. His writing rewarded close listening, packing decades of history into individual stanzas, but that kind of intensity demanded attention, too. There’s a reason so many writers have spoken of his work in ritualistic terms, evoking astral planes and sages and philosophers. A Ka project, by necessity, is something that asks for the listener’s respect and time; it does not come to you. Of course, from a distance, that kind of art would seem solitary.
But Ka’s own catalogue betrays this idea. His music, again and again, returns to community: towards the bodies that hip-hop is built upon, towards the families found in living rooms, towards the millions of people that are felt, but rarely seen, in apartment complexes and alleyways. For all the pains he made space for in his music—for all the blood in the sand, all the discarded bodies and broken souls—he made plenty of space for love, too, however hard-earned. His music was neither cynical nor overtly celebratory; instead, it was frank, graceful, and unerringly empathetic, a showing of scars accompanied by a quiet smile.
There is some solace to be taken in the reaction to his passing. In a manner of hours and days, a seemingly bottomless reservoir of stories about the soft-spoken and hard-nosed storyteller from Brownsville burst open: fans meeting him at his pop-up shows, rappers celebrating his dedication to the genre, writers getting praised by one of the best to ever touch a pen. His material, it seems, changed lives. It certainly changed mine.
Ka’s best work imagined history as something of a Möbius strip, as something that doubles back on itself and repeats in strange ways. Perhaps that’s why so much of his material looked back centuries rather than decades; the distance allowed him to underline how little had changed with the seasons. His work was about the work of stories and ideas themselves, about the things that hold even as customs turn heretical, borders dissolve, and tablets get scrawled over. In this way, his work suggested infinities. It is gut-wrenching to imagine that window already closing, but perhaps he left it ajar: his work lives on in the ways he is remembered, his history imagined and retold in a manner not unlike a verse from the man himself. Ghosts, after all, have a way of lingering.
