Ka. Photo by Jeff Henrikson for The FADER.
Kaseem Ryan, the beloved Brooklyn rapper and producer better known as Ka, has passed away, according to a Monday, October 14 post to his Instagram account. He “died unexpectedly in New York City on October 12,” the post reads. He was 52.
Ka was born and raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. Per the post, he was a “20-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department” and a first responder to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, eventually rising to the rank of captain. He achieved all of this while quietly amassing a prodigious catalog of densely lyrical, starkly produced music — 11 solo albums, as well as collaborative releases as one half of Hermit and the Recluse, Dr. Yen Lo, Metal Clergy, and NightBreed each. His most recent LP, The Thief Next to Jesus, arrived in August.
According to Monday’s Instagram post, Ka is survived by his wife, mother, and sister. “We kindly ask that the privacy of Ka’s family and loved ones be respected as they grieve this incalculable loss,” the post finishes.
Ka’s rap career began in earnest in 1989, when his cousin Dion gave him $1,000 to kickstart his journey. “A thousand dollars was a million dollars back then,” he told Muna Mire during an interview for a 2016 FADER profile. His first groups, Natural Elements and Nightbreed, generated buzz in the early ’90s but never found commercial success as the rap zeitgeist moved away from sophisticated rhyme schemes and bare-bones beats.
At the turn of the millennium, he shifted his focus from music to his new job with the FDNY. In the late aughts, though, just before making captain, he started rapping again, self-releasing his first official LP, Iron Works, in 2008. “No one knows what they were put here for but what I do best is write rhymes,” he told The FADER; “that is my gift for this world.”
For the next 16 years, he was as uncompromising as they come; he bounced between 24-hour firefighting shifts and 12-hour studio sessions — not to mention the time he spent writing (sometimes weeks on a single bar), and sold all of his own records on Stamps.com: CDs for $10, vinyl for $20.
Following the news of Ka’s passing, writers, fans, and fellow artists flooded to social media to pay their respects. See a short selection of their tributes below.
Ka was literally one of the best writers to ever exist
— chester watson (@chstrwtsn) October 14, 2024
