Review

Ka

Honor Killed The Samurai

Iron Works • 2016

Topics hardly ever picked up by rap-music, no. 22: The inner child. Rappers don’t have inner children. Rappers have always been grown man, including a penis, a pistol and an endless self-assurance when it comes to their actions. And lots of all the above. However, the New Yorker rapper Ka keeps on making extraordinary appearances in the game of rap. »Want to find a reason that I’m still alive breathing/I wanna heal my inner child«, as stated on the EP »Just«. Ka’s music involves a lot of mental exercise, lots of verbal acrobatics. Other than that, there is not much movement. The firefighter”:hhttp://www.factmag.com/2016/08/22/new-york-post-criticised-for-disgusting-front-page-about-rapper-ka/ lays his tired eyes on minimal beat frames. After long days, they can’t but see on at night. With his lyrics, Ka is looking deep into the darkness – both, the inner and the outer kind. In comparison to Ka in his darkest moments, “Earl Sweatshirt seems like a sun worshipper. Ka doesn’t make those moments brighter but he equips them with a fascinating elegance. Through his various solo records, he has peeled his instrumentals away, layer by layer, has sanded and polished them. What’s left are black blocks with flashingly sharp edges. Imagine a street at night: Straight lines, hard curbs, hardly any light. A siren goes off, a dog barks. In the middle of the street, there is a decanter full of water. It glistens. That’s what Ka’s music is like: Opressing like Mobb Deep but with the lyrical standards of a GAZ. And it comes in such a poignant black elegance that it would fit much better into MoMa than the Picasso-Baby by Ka’s hood-neighbor Jay-Z.