Ka performing during 2014 Pitchfork Music Festival at Union Park in Chicago.
Credit...Barry Brecheisen/WireImage, via Getty Image

Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.

by · NY Times

Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.

His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”

First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.

In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”

Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.

He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.

In 2007, at the age of 35, he released his solo debut album, “Iron Works.” Initially, he had 1,000 copies of the album made and used a guerrilla approach to promote it.

“I gave them to my cousins, my friends. I still had, like, 990 CDs left. So I started giving them away,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Times. “I’d drive around the city, and if I heard music coming from the next car at a red light — boom-boom-boom — I’d say, ‘You like hip-hop?’”

By the time he released his second album, “Grief Pedigree,” in 2012, he had cultivated a small but passionate enough fan base to announce the release on social media and hold a curbside sale in Greenwich Village.

That led to a tradition of album releases: Ka would announce a new album on social media and set up on a street corner to sell a few dozen hard copies from the trunk of his vehicle.

In 2017, a New York Times round up of 25 influential songs said that Ka would sit in the study of his Brooklyn home, pack up orders for his CDs and mail them to his fans.

When he wasn’t making music, he was a captain in the New York Fire Department.

“I try to keep my job and music separate,” he said in the 2017 Times interview. “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.”

In some of his songs, Ka invoked the violent lifestyle of drug dealing in the 1990s, and he bemoaned police brutality. In a 2016 article, he was criticized by members of the New York Police Department for what they felt were anti-police lyrics.

The statement on Instagram about his death said he was a 20-year veteran of the Fire Department and responded to the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attack.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his mother and sister, according to the statement on Ka’s Instagram page. The survivors names were not given.

Ka’s most recent album, “The Thief Next to Jesus,” explores Christian themes and was released this year.

In a review of the album, Pitchfork wrote: “Using understated, purposeful phrases and fragments, Ka draws you in, forcing you to hang onto each word. His delivery is patient and measured, with a steely intensity that’s unshakable, as if he’s never been more assured in his path forward.”

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

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