When music writers use the word “indie,” they generally have a certain kind of recording artist in mind: a white bohemian, with a battered guitar and a tricky haircut, who dwells on the distant outskirts of the pop-industrial complex. Ka, whose given name is Kaseem Ryan, doesn’t quite fit that description, but he may be the platonic ideal of an independent musician in 2017. It would be hard to find a more thoroughgoing D.I.Y. musical enterprise. Ka is the rare rapper who handles both rhymes and beats, writing his lyrics and producing the music that accompanies them. He has directed most of his videos, and he self-releases his music, on his own label. It is not a profitable venture. Ka spends as much as $15,000 per album and has never broken even. “I make music, but I’m not in the music business,” he says. “It’s my hobby.”
“It’s my hobby” is one of Ka’s mantras. It’s accurate, but also an understatement. Over the past several years, Ka has released some of the most gripping music in any genre. His records offer a poignant, distinctive take on classic New York hip-hop: vivid stories of street life and struggle narrated in virtuosic rhymes over music of bleak beauty. His output has won him a small but passionate fan base and critical raves in Pitchfork and Spin.
The magazine The Fader, an influential arbiter of musical cool, proclaimed Ka “New York rap’s greatest living treasure.”
For Ka to have won even modest recognition is an improbable underdog triumph. He spent much of the 1990s trying to make it as a rapper, quit music altogether and returned a decade later, releasing his solo debut at age 35. Today he is 44. This career trajectory defies one of the seemingly immutable laws of pop, and of hip-hop in particular, a genre in which the cult of youth and novelty is especially pronounced.
Then there is the matter of Ka’s day job. He is a captain in the New York City Fire Department. It’s a story that has the ring of folklore: One of the great recording artists of the current decade is a musical moonlighter, a middle-aged man who earns his living as the decorated company commander of Engine 235 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I try to keep my job and music separate,” Ka says. “I never wanted be ‘The Rapping Captain.’ I try to be a good firefighter. And when I come home, I try to make some dope music.”
From “Putting Out Fires by Day, Music at Night” by Jody Rosen for The New York Times Magazine, 2016; Portrait by Erik Madigan Heck (@erikmadiganheck)
