Ka - Descendants of Cain [2020]

Welcome to one of my many Write-Ups, where I dive into a contextual history of a project from an artist, while also breaking down the different parts worth mentioning. Come over to my Write-Ups page for a list of all of the work I’ve done so far.

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“Must we all suffer for what one man has done?”

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For a character that retains such a legendary status amongst the figures of the Old Testament, Cain remains one of the most mysterious. He is known as the originator of *human* evil, the first murderer, the first fratricide, and the list of titles can go on; but outside of the fourth book of Genesis, there is nothing about the history and legacy of Cain outside of a few warnings in the New Testament about deeds that may reach the heights of his evil. Like many traditions that have grown with humanity in the past two-thousand years that derive from Christian scripture, much of the cultural understandings of this character have been subject to human addition and interpretation, where now we have a much different and more complete version of who Cain is to the people today. Cain has become a symbol of jealousy, a comparable character for spurned and outcasted folk, and founder of a society that lives outside of the rules of the Lord. However, in a way, Cain can be seen as a tragic figure, arbitrarily passed over by God to favor his brother, Abel, and, once the strong feelings of man caused him to make a tragic mistake, was marked for all of eternity as a pariah. He was a son to Adam, a father to Enoch, a builder of a city, and the beginning of a line of artisans and craftsman; all of these things are worthy of empathy and admiration, complicating the legacy of character that has been used so liberally as a face of ancient and deep-rooted human greed. But what of the people that came after Cain? Those who lived with him in life, and who continued his legacy well after his death? Cain, who was branded by God with “The Mark of Cain”, lived amongst similarly marked people, who may not have been singled out by the Lord as evil, but who came together with Cain to share in it. But are they truly evil people? Taken literally there are no true descendants of Cain, as his entire line was destroyed by the Flood that Noah (who was a descendant of Cain’s younger brother, Seth) and his lineage alone survived, but there are people who live today as children of outcasts, sons and daughters of the “marked” peoples, who live in the shadow of a legacy of both committed sin and received discrimination. They live everywhere, but this story revolves around those huddled-up on the corners of a town known as Brownsville.

Brooklyn is the center of the city, both spiritually and geographically, and neighborhoods like Brownsville are even closer to the heart still

Brooklyn, as I’m sure you’ve heard many times over the years, is a vastly different place today that it was in the 70’s. Where today you would find an avocado bagel bar or a gastropub, 50 years ago would be a dry cleaners, a storefront where you could get some cheap pizza, or a stoop to while away the day in the heat of summer or the bite of winter. Despite the vastness of New York City, its boroughs, especially the other poorer boroughs like Queens and Staten Island, stood isolated from each other, the citizens fighting to keep their lives intact in the face of extreme poverty. It was in this time that a hugely popular way of making money hit the streets: weed dealing was nothing, something to do on the side, but cocaine became a million dollar business in towns where most people had never made one percent of that in their entire lives. Coke was only the beginning, for when the crack wave hit, the ghettos became fortresses for the new richest men of America, an opulence that soon gave way to the battlefield. Kids that entered the game at 12 wouldn’t make it out of their teens, and whenever the police began putting pressure on the slums and drug gangs, hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, fathers and sons that would never return home to guide and be guided. It is in this environment that many of hip-hop’s most revered figures took shape: Talib Kweli, Jay-Z, and The Notorious B.I.G., all growing up deeply affected by the crucible-like nature of 80’s Brooklyn.

Brownsville is one of the many neighborhoods in Brooklyn, being for the most part a residential area that has traditionally been comprised of minorities, starting with it’s Jewish population at its inception that quickly changed to Black and Latino in the mid 50’s. It doesn’t benefit from being one of the more well-known neighborhoods of the borough like Bed-Stuy or Crown Heights, as such all of it’s struggles with poverty and drugs have gone down in relative anonymity. Even in the realm of hip-hop, where rappers have grown to fame as “Brooklyn legends”, Brownsville remained the outcast of the group. Being one of the centers of crime and drug-dealing in New York City, growing up on the streets of Brownsville meant that you became a special breed of person throughout the years (if you didn’t catch a case or worse); whereas Biggie could talk about flipping a ki in Bed-Stuy like it was nothing, out in the streets of Brownsville a dude would come up and slice your face for nothing at all, and if he did have a reason for doing it he wasn’t going to leave the job unfinished. In this place where cocaine and crack flowed freely it seemed like, for anyone outside of the drug game, the money had dried up. With fathers and sons locked up and killed, mothers became the rocks for thousands of children, providing for entire extended families at times. Families grew up 15 to a household, 5 to a bed, living on rice and water. But I think more important than anything these kids were growing up not only without figures to guide them in the right direction, but they were growing up with the only real figures to look up to being dealers, street captains, crooked preachers, and dopeboys, leading the youth to repeat the cycle. In this environment, amidst adversity in almost every aspect of his life, is where we can find glimpses of Kaseem Ryan, who today is known as Ka.

Ka, AKA K.A., AKA Kaseem Ryan, AKA The Recluse. That mustache really gives him that firefighter energy, doesn’t it?

Born in ’72, Ka witnessed first-hand the hardships of Brownsville, but he had it a little differently than most kids: he lived a life with no money in a crowded household, but his father was alive and around past the age of 6 whenever he was released from prison. Ka’s father was more than just a figure for Ka himself, but he served as mentor for all of the kids on his block who weren’t lucky enough to have their father come home. Ka still fell into the same traps as many of the youth of Brownsville did, moving and shaking with the pawns in the streets, having often spoken in rhyme about his actions as a teen and how they’ve affected his later life. He grew cold and distant, putting his family through hardships that only he truly knows, and harboring a pain that he still reflects on nearly 40 years later. Growing past his teenage years he focused on his craft, rapping, and would spend the 90’s running with a group called the Natural Elements, dropping out of the lineup whenever he figured he was the “weak link of the group”. In and out of college for most of the decade, he eventually decided to make a go at it with his best friend, Kev, and together they formed Nightbreed. But success was still out of his reach, and after sitting down to seriously consider where his life was going, he discovered being a Firefighter was his career calling. He quit rapping entirely, buckled down to move up in the NYFD, and married his wife Mimi. But as the years went on he found that rapping was more than just something he did on the side: it was key to who he was as a person, and, seeing a void in the lyrical quality of mainstream hip-hop, and with a push from Mimi, he decided to make another go of creating a name for himself in in the game. His debut album in 2008, Iron Works, would have been a respected, but low fanfare, release were it not for attention from a certain Genius. GZA, the Wu-Tang Clan’s premier swordsman, caught wind of Ka’s skills, and placed him on his fifth solo album Pro Tools. This one feature instantly put Ka on the radar of everyone in the underground hip-hop game, and from there, he rose steadily upward. Grief Pedigree, The Night’s Gambit, 1200 B.C., and his collaboration with DJ Preservation Days With Dr. Yen Lo each increased his respect over the next decade, each release doubling down on his dejected and verbose delivery, as well as his dark and minimal production choices. 2016’s Honor Killed the Samurai was a level up from his previous efforts, sticking to a clear and thick theme for the entirety of the project, using the motif of medieval Japan to indirectly speak on his life growing up, the state of the hood, and the motivations and pitfalls of living life in the street. It led very nicely into 2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens, which served as a Greek mythology version of Honor Killed the Samurai, but instead of self-producing like he did on the previous effort, he enlisted the enigmatic Animoss for every instrumental, billing themselves as a new duo called Hermit and the Recluse. It has been two years since Orpheus vs. the Sirens, and besides two features given to frequent collaborator Roc Marciano and New York experimentalist Navy Blue, Ka has been characteristically silent. That doesn’t mean that his pen has been quiet however, and in fact it seems that his pen in the past two years has become louder, more poetic, and more focused than ever, because his new project, Descendants of Cain, serves as his most potent release lyrically and his most profound topically.

There are a lot of elements to Descendants of Cain, and despite its heavily guarded secrets and cryptic messaging, it is its main character, Ka, that serves as the most difficult to pin down. A lot of this can be attributed to Ka’s rapping style: it is monotone, flat, sticks to a fairly predictable rhyme scheme, and is paced along with beats that operate in a pretty similar range of BPMs. In a way, in the least negative sense I can convey, Ka is not really a “rapper”; words have been thrown around like “poet” and “spoken word artist” when describing the talent he exhibits, and I don’t think these terms are too far off of the mark. You aren’t listening to Ka to hear him rattle off a slick flow, or really not even to hear “clever” wordplay persay; what he is doing is telling you what he wants you to hear (albeit in a very constructed way), and the wordplay he uses is done in a way to give you much more than one meaning for almost every line he tells you. Whenever he says “still built my ark in the face of ridicule” he is speaking on his faith, his career as both a rapper and a fireman, and as a young man growing up making his own poor decisions. These kinds of double meanings are the bread and butter of Ka’s style, and you can listen to this entire project from a different perspective depending on how you interpret his words. His closest contemporaries include people like Roc Marciano and billy woods, but where Marci would lean into his pimpish ways and billy his unorthodox cryptology, Ka is infused with an unmatched sense of wisdom. You may be put off by his delivery that seems devoid of any charisma, dry of any sort of interest, but you will stay because the things he is actually saying will be like water to you, quenching this deep rooted thirst for knowledge that Ka, having positioned himself into the role of a sort of sage, will be more than willing to share with you. The key to listening to Descendants of Cain, and by extension Ka as an artist, is patience. You will not understand everything he is telling you on the first listen, but there is a picture that is being painted for you that, while it doesn’t qualify as a concept or an interconnected story, serves as a sort of mindset or way of thinking that Ka is using to gain a new perspective on things that he has already spoken on at length throughout his entire career. Where Honor Killed the Samurai is an album devoted to the motivations of hood soldiers told though the Bushido Code, and Orpheus vs. the Sirens is told in a similar way through Greek mythology, Descendants of Cain has much more lofty and philosophical goals, trying to explain the world-state of today through the lens of Old Testament characters and stories.

Cain and his descendants fell victim to things that the children of 70’s Brownsville knew all too well: harsh punishments, a cyclical nature of life where things seemed impossible to improve, and, most importantly, a fundamental lack of guidance from figures of authority. Ka goes through great lengths on Descendants of Cain to make the comparison that he and his generation were doomed to fail by these things, not as a way to deflect blame and responsibility (he takes almost any opportunity to apologize and to own his past) but to acknowledge that the problem is one that is rotten to the core. He says on the track Sins of the Father that “they used to call us deviants / but if they was feeding us we might have had obedience / you know my stock is only as good as my ingredients”; if the ingredients to a life were comprised of dealing drugs, being locked up, and being taught that loyalty to “the game” is more important that loyalty to family then how can you expect someone to grow? Cain and his descendants were sent east of Eden, to what was called the Land of Nod, as a sort of exile where they could wallow in their sin, but what did this really accomplish? People who had nothing to do with Cain’s sin were now forced to live in these conditions that did not promote a healthy life, shackled in the mind by things completely out of their control. Now imagine the children of Brownsville; on the track Patron Saints, Ka describes that the people whom the kids looked up to were heroin dealers, scramblers, and peddlers, people whose lives have already been ravaged by the circumstances, and now they were imparting “wisdom” upon a growing generation. In these situations they grow up with the same mindset Ka has on the track Brother’s Keeper, taking to heart Cain’s infamous response to God and hardening their hearts to people that were supposed to be their brothers, friends, and lovers, looking out for themselves above all others in a world that is so hostile towards them. The tracks Solitude of Enoch and The Eye Of A Needle reflect two results of this sort of thinking: the former is self-imposed isolation that is caused through harming others, cutting yourself off from true connections from people. The latter is what you begin to crave whenever the connection with others cannot form: wealth. By the end of the record on Old Justice, you have the cycle laid out by Ka: poverty, hunger, and a desire for wealth drives those impressionable youth to deal and rob, which leads to retaliation and murder, which is responded to with the ancient law of “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth”, perverted into “a body for an eye, a body for a tooth”. These young drug dealers think that by acquiring wealth and respect in the hood that they’ll be in a better position, but what they don’t realize is this: any young man “thought he was moving solution without equating the problem”. The problem is deeper, ancient, systematic, and cyclical. In this way, the youth of the ghettos are those marked by God, suffering the sins of those before them, and in that suffering they are doomed to make the same mistakes.

Honor Killed the Samurai, his 2016 album, remains my personal favorite Ka album; I will always love the Japanese influences found here, the the readings from Bushido have been ironed into my mind forever.

Guidance is the key. Cain was the first to succumb to the human feelings of jealousy and greed because, put simply (and perhaps incorrectly to some denominations with a different view of scripture), he knew no better. He had no mentors, and whenever he left for the Land of Nod and created a society under him, he could not be a mentor to those under him, setting off domino effect of generations without the wisdom to see past the immediate, past their own selfish worldly desires. This concept is what I believe Ka is trying to get across to us on Descendants of Cain more than anything else: the value of wisdom and guidance. He speaks personally on the kinds of people that led him through his youth, the kind of advice he received from his “patron saints” growing up, but it isn’t until the very last track that he reveals where he received the inspiration to change his life and to start living a life within decency. I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev) is one part touching, two parts heartbreaking, stating that it was the encouragement from his wife, the UNDYING love and support from his dear mother, and the true brotherhood and companionship he felt with his best friend Kev, who died in a car accident some five years ago, that led him to finally change his ways. It shows that, despites the hundreds and hundreds of people that have populated his life since youth, guiding him in the wrong direction and leading him astray of where he needs to be, it took only three of good character to help him find his way. It is a beautiful track in its own right, and despite being a sort of odd man out thematically I think it’s a perfect epilogue to a detailed explanation of his motivations and actions.

Descendants of Cain is Ka’s best album. While Honor Killed the Samurai may be bolder, and Orpheus vs. the Sirens more vibrant, this album is the most complete package lyrically, the most appropriately scored instrumentally, and it is unflinchingly consistent in its message of the power of figures in positions of guidance. Separate from the themes and messages behind the album, Ka the artist has reached heights that no one in hip-hop has ever reached, managing to straddle the line between hip-hop and a sort of spoken word poetry better than anyone in the game right now, staying listenable and engaging while not sacrificing what makes him unique. In all of these ways, despite being one of the many descendants of Cain out there, Ka has broken from the cycle that he was destined to through means out of his control. He has used his wisdom and position as a one of the genres most treasured lyricists to present the problems of his home in ways that will surely be celebrated for decades. In this way, Ka is a marked man in a different fashion than Cain was: instead of being marked evil for deeds that required understanding and empathy, maybe he has been marked wise for overcoming those obstacles, learning from them, and teaching others through his poetry how to follow in his footsteps.

Ka’s Personal Website (Please consider buying from him directly)/Spotify/YouTube