Ka Made Rap on His Own Terms. Hear How in 7 Songs.

Dear listeners,

One of the great joys of being a pop music critic is being able to ingest an artist’s whole body of work, find the throughlines and themes and meaningful resonances, and then be a bullhorn, sharing them with the world. And perhaps the job’s greatest grimness is to do the very same, but in service of memorial.

That’s what I’ll be doing below, about the unfailingly and perspective-shiftingly great Brooklyn rapper Ka, who died this weekend, at a far-too-young 52.

Ka’s music was a frame of mind as much as a sound — beginning in the late 2000s, when he was in his mid-30s, he made rap music as if by ancient, tattered blueprint. His raw material was the hip-hop of the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, but he didn’t seek to faithfully remake it. Instead, he distilled it, burned off its excesses, and created a thing of extreme concentration, thick poetry and icy tone.

He was an inheritor of the woozily intricate narrative work of MF Doom, of the cocksure twistiness of his childhood friend Smoothe Da Hustler, and the more esoteric members of the Wu-Tang Clan, like GZA and Killah Priest.

Ka produced most of his own music, though words were always his primary concern. Sometimes, he went drumless, or something very close to it — a negative-space perversion that served to outline his words in hard chalk.

“They’re not for the radio, the club or the masses,” Ka wrote of his songs, in an early biographical statement on his website. “My music is for those who miss early ’90s hip-hop when pain and struggle were the dominant themes.”