THE REAL OF 2024 Book Preview: KA
#ScienceOnMusic Review of Ka's The Thief Next To Jesus LP, that will appear in my upcoming book, The Real of 2024
By Sunez aka SkillastratorLO
The MF DOOM of this Invisible Renaissance era, he emerges right at the start of this era with the classic 2012 debut ,Grief Pedigree, and has one of the most immaculate collections of audio tomes ever recorded. For the first handful of albums of this revitalized career, they were works never heard from. Now they are works we expect that only can be heard from him. The thematic envelope has become the easiest way to figure the like/dislike most path as the martial wisdom mined for 2016’s Honor Killed the Samurai or the extended scholastic endeavor of 2022’s Woeful Studies and Languish Arts LPs. The themes and constructs become metaphors to brilliantly mine through as the latter or parallel the alike realities as on the former. However, they can also guide the music crates which Ka ably excavates. Ka’s influence as DOOM is so similar in challenging the expected performer expectations, the star quest to merely creation invest an creator artist is allowed to have. DOOM said no fucking face card, no assumptions of what he is. It isn’t hiding his Blackness, it accentuates it. It makes it universal in its expressiveness when he did it. Laid out, layered and laying endlessly, DOOM’s words piled incredibly. Remembered In Perfection. And Ka, deliberately eliminating the break’s overbearingness, he made it about his poetry. It wasn’t RZA because he is just the pioneer GOAT showing us we can do anything with samples at any moment. It wasn’t the great Alchemist nor the superior brother of aide and guidance, Roc Marciano, who really put the breakless track to the fore. It was Ka who had an entire theology on why the drums interrupted him. It was the preponderance of the drum being the main voice when Ka was going to be the breakbeat. His inflections and insights being the interwoven breaks that repeat us into head nod, rewind us into thoughtful prodding. There is no such thing as a breakless beat because pockets, the waves of aural ocean the MC’s verses attach to and ride through, are based on groove. Ka produced his own pocket groove that stayed back. A minimalism that Ice-T sought preferring the orchestral simplicity leaving the track to just drums and something else. The minimalism of Havoc’s drums, RZA’s songs being equalized and styled distinctly for each of his eight Wu MCs. It’s always about that word. Ka found it anew and became an MC that cared only to share his scripture. Not perform it. It lives on the song’s page. This author loved it. Even as I make my own music I only seek any forum words live. This is a gospel I understand and Ka knows there is a special Blackness of sound that we create to share our thoughts musically.
The Thief Next To Jesus is Ka’s gospel where he mines the genre of Gospel, in all its mystery unfounded Christianess, the longing, the wails, the beauty, the musical power of Black American root, it’s Blues, to exclaim his insights. The LP begins another LP where his musical production is as immediately sublime as his scroll of verses. Musically, it must be noted that all of Ka’s Iron Works begin with his rasped and tempered voice that conveys itself emotively and compassionately. There are few voices that speak so vibrantly sincere to those who directly relate to his poverty and hells overcome and to those who endearingly empathize and relate. And so the songs write into its sounds crafted…There is the bluesy pulls and womps of “Bread Wine Body Blood” where the ever non-didactic Ka can share a blatant diatribe against the extreme violence and sexualization of our music, “I had to tell you, that's on the path to failure roadmap/ It ain't the way to no goals, it's a chokehold, slow tap/The gist of this is to keep submissive and broke rap/ Another poison message, you holdin' precious, cause you're toe tap…” to a summarized chorus line of “It's the shared struggle that we all go through/ Don't be the weapon they use to harm you.” The harmonizing humming in varying octaves, “Oh, help me lord!” on “Fragile Faith,” the pocket groove is just as fragile as on so many Ka songs. Where is the fucking pocket that he’s rapping on this and instead of finding it it’s that his lines are an attached oratory to the soul, alma con alma, as he verses, “ Watched by dice and snake eyes/ pray you have better luck in the sewer/ listening to the ruler/ hopin' I'll measure up/ placed in many sticky situations, but was never stuck/ I've been tried, hope I'm inside when the gates of heaven shut..” Ka’s verses always have a wordplay note to catch and/or a brilliantly clever word usage as “Wanted all the jewels, just wouldn't choose police bracelets” and so often followed by advise only salvaged to share by the grittiest of life moments, “Before council/ be doubtful/ don't speak if they seek statement.” The layering works his mission (“The pre-gun lands we brung hands, it's ammunition/ I plan my death before I plan submission/ Came to change man condition/ but one fan sufficient…” - “Borrowed Time”), his song arrangements creative going bar to chorus in a hymn on “Beautiful” (“They sling mud but you bring love, that's beautiful/ How did K become, I’m tryna give the baby somethin' beautiful/ Abundant, ugly in this world, I come and make it, beautiful/ Your heart's a ruin if the parts you're doin' ain't, beautiful..”) or the spoken verses, always pensive, on the wooing and yelling of “True Holy Water” (“I'm thrilled, cause I don't need appeal to a real few I speak a bitter loss and once I get it off, I feel new/I was born to pen bars, not sure if these songs are memoirs…”), the word usage is subtly astounding (“Advance lines/ about the last times/ I had to relent/ since conceived/ believed/ some things, it's too bad to repent/ Was charmed, had a moms to rejoice, a dad to resent/ Knew it was all about a dollar before I gathered a cent…” - “Hymn and I”) as it constantly layers him into profound insights of melody (“These gardens hardened a heart that was tender” - “Such Devotion”). The ability to produce an vocal break groove and then rhyme in a successive, ever driving manner, keeping his calm, understated tone is a crucial component of his unique stylistics and is exemplified on “God Undefeated” diving into a “Jesus” wail and a cut organ stab wave with “No battle was light, tryna fight the fast/ Believe wicked in the lead, nothing nice can last/ No emotin' emotions, I like to mask/ Came to bring you singles, left a righteous path/ Over here they riff, from many sites to wrath/ Goals once thought unattainable, I might surpass…” And again the vocal loop and the piano chiming high on “Soul and Spirit,” you can hear Ka have his tone’s rasp serve its own hook as it inflects into a bass on the chorus, “We might be equal, but we not the same/ To absorb loss, there's a lot to gain,” give us something to mull over (“Is it patience or time wasting?) and just exquisitely pens, “All these dope concerns stressed the buck/ True wounds, I dressed it up” that are infused with soul as he pauses extended in remembrance. There is the gorgeous choir and lead that marches “Such Devotion,” where he truly humanizes some of the worst done for a better sum in such a brief set of bars for it to be done, “When you're broke crushing coke don't take much coaxing/Cooking the raw is a foot in the door, tryna bust it open/ But dudes ain't making moves, our view is just commotion…” There is a formula now known from Ka and maybe some can duplicate it yet it demands sincerity, soul and love for our people. Who could bite this? That so many of us, this author surely, are influenced by it and inspired from its magnitude, is a blessing of creators’ creations inspiring other’s creations. Now Ka’s Iron Works are a part of a canon essential works. They may be ranked, rated and singled out but all of them are essential. The Thief Next To Jesus LP is another.