Harmony Holiday
Trapped between faith and disillusionment, the late rapper’s final album is a viciously gentle and yearning gospel of one.
The Thief Next to Jesus, by Ka, Iron Works
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Ka, in ancient Egyptian mythology, is the vital essence stored within the body; it escapes at the time of physical death but is eternal. Ka, today, is the moniker of late rapper and firefighter Kaseem Ryan, who made that ambrosia his destiny in invoking it. The Ka is egoless; while the soma tempers and dilutes it with pride, the Ka soars in the auric field or absconds to the subconscious to shield itself, and awaits its time of spiritual and psychic dominance. In his craft, as a rapper, Ryan led with his Ka or Chi, his life force; he channeled its innate patterns against trends and hype that might have stifled them, and emerged with a gentleness almost vicious in his sound, a barreling, royal cadence, never too didactic, nor too ratchet or frivolous.
Ka in screenshot of “Such Devotion” music video.
Ka wielded the etheric authority his stage name called forth, as if to alchemize base metals into gold using the intangible utterance, tempting dense syntax toward the transcendent; lyrically, he rendered himself the center of his own syncretic American Epic. He maintained sovereignty in a territory of the bought and sold, became counterspell against the tyranny of mainstream and industry-sanctioned rappers, reapers, behaving as interim jesters for a court of hyper-capitalist executives. Ka repaved the rap messiah’s path, one that requires a blue collar, soot in the larynx and lungs from being a first responder during 9/11 and a twenty-year veteran of the NYFD, swarms of street cred and honor from coming of age in Brownsville, Brooklyn. His final album, The Thief Next to Jesus, released a few days after his fifty-second birthday in August 2024, and a few months before he would die unexpectedly of undisclosed causes this October, is a last supper in proportion and temperament, and enters the tradition of wanting to be ready invented in negro spirituals, and the self-elegizing impulse that this humility and readiness demands.
Ka in screenshot of “Such Devotion” music video.
Every sample on the fourteen-track album is a hymnal, a gnostic gospel of one, as Ka is his own producer. And each track expounds preparatory rites for a dignified death, glances into the abyss, and recounts candid daydreams about drifting toward it in sleep, a gleeful leaving. The Ka, again in ancient Egyptian conceptions, is also referred to as the second king or double, a twin soul. Hear the intent of the first syllable in Kabbala or the middle of the mystical road to Merkaba. Akin to nirvana, merkaba implies a body and soul wreathed and tethered in light, a light body, humanized by speech and deed but electric and amorphous, pure energy, symbolic enlightenment made tangible as shine, shrine. Ka’s writing is the beauty of us, under and as such electric light. He understands that speech must carry that bright flame, bludgeon with it, to be valid, to reach the good-vs.-evil valor of the crucifix he dutifully approaches on his final artistic statement. The thief, in Luke’s account of the biblical crucifixion, is two thieves, like the ka is two souls, transfigured by disgrace into glory. The first mocks Jesus for not being miraculous enough to save them from their abject fate, while the second repents, finds god as if engulfed in the splendor of god and reuniting with his Ka, his karma, wheeling or willing itself toward him through divine encounter with the fervent, messianic heart.
Ka in screenshot of “Such Devotion” music video.
Ka’s gospel is a fitting death note. He is divining and admittedly, begrudgingly trapped between blind faith and utter disillusionment. We embark on the martyr’s journey with a litany of grievances: son, the most profane rap . . . seeing muscles where’s the brains at . . . all that shit, dummy rap. The opening thesis of a familiar sermon on the underground. In this netherworld, the promised land and hell share neurolinguistic real estate. The righteousness and slight redundancy of these opening-ceremony complaints against the industry cede to the macabre yet uplifting second track, “Beautiful,” a rapt high note, goodbye note. He’ll make your life / beautiful, the choir sample calls and responds, harrowingly. Ka interrupts, may you live a nice long life, hope it’s—the choir responds, beau-ti-ful. Lived a few scores ’ til I truly saw . . . When I part they grieve . . . Took a toll on my body but the soul probably / beautiful. The deeper we travel into The Thief’s world, the more intricate the map to its own undoing. I hope it’s borrowed time when my time come, he repeats, resigned and numbed, ’cause all my time wasn’t kind, son. Heretic vocal samples theorizing the hypocrisy of Christian faith in black life alternate with production reliant on church hollers, organs, choirs recorded as if overheard while walking barefoot through 1934, until we are rollicking in the pews of a small black church somewhere between voyeur, savior, saved, and damned. We the have-nots, he declares in the middle of the distressed ministry, reminding us his faith is sliced through with rage. But he titles the next song “God Undefeated,” and confesses indeed a believer if survive ’til the finish / God side with the winners. Winners comes to sound like winter after several go-arounds, and we’ve found ourselves, broken into bits of a man’s semiprivate unfinished eulogy to himself, where vocal samples yawn or yearn like sunlight through stained glass, and we are flattened saints spying on the fallen angels in the congregation with him, as the Ka returns to banish and free itself.
Screenshot of “Such Devotion” music video.
“Such Devotion” finds Ka testifying from the other side it was rougher here, as if he’s already crossed over and guarantees himself reprieve, a promised land. I’m inside when the gates of heaven shut, he assures on “Fragile Faith.” Many disciples beating they bibles / Jesus, we need leaders with rifles / Many followers lovin’ the psalms / God is powerless, need some good brothers that’s armed, he regroups on “Hymn and I,” and then, in direct opposition to that caustic dismissal of God, hard navigating being from the lowest tribe. Ka, as the thief, enacts the crisis of faith of one sacrificed beside Jesus, heckling like a nonbeliever, then surrendering like a devotee. Ambivalence works on him like a death wish that is actually a pursuit of immortality, an inversion of life and death in the slant of his phrasing and perception. The album reads as the deliberate and gratified goodbye of one who has done all he can in this realm and is jaded into ecstatic resignation, peerless, with distant glimmers of his genealogy in D’Angelo’s concession to “Devil’s Pie” or “1000 Deaths,” and Curtis Mayfield’s “I Plan to Stay a Believer,” wherein God also looms as the antihero.
Ka in screenshot of “Such Devotion” music video.
Militancy goes limp in the presence of spirituals, proving the futility of vengeance and lust for violence alongside the futility of played-out moralizing about intellectual substance or lack thereof in black music. No one cares; the inner child of those raised in the inner city is part gang leader, part drill rapper, the Ka cannot rehabilitate the overcompensations and overcorrections of the oppressed, it’s elitist and naive to try—they are natural responses to contaminated environments, indoctrination, internalized neglect. Two beatified visions haunt The Thief with the spirit of its dead-on-the-cross creator: one, it’s no small calling to walk through fire into the cascading sound of your own prophetic words, prophesying your own fall; and two, it’s not his own death Ka was reenacting, it’s his resurrection—the thief was ultimately saved, condemned to recur in this land his soul longed to escape. The faint voice of an Amiri Baraka sample reminds us, as one track fades, Everybody talkin ’bout heaven ain’t goin’ there, a negro proverb about how no one deferring to paradise is ready for it. Our manifestos of suffering reveal our hedonism and land us back in hell. Ka’s exceptional beauty in a genre built on unchecked god-complexes is that he could have cast himself as Jesus, too, but refrained, and played the sideman so well he dematerialized to save his spirit. Today you will be with me in paradise, Jesus assured the penitent thief.
Harmony Holiday is the author of several collections of poetry and numerous essays on music and culture. Her collection Maafa came out in April 2022.