In 1999, he quit focusing on music and became a firefighter. He worked his way up the ranks of the fire department for a decade until, just before making captain in 2009, he realized he was missing what had been a huge part of his life. “I think of rhymes everyday, I can’t not,” he says. “I can’t help it. It became hard to stay away.” And so Ka got back into it, with greater success than ever. Across the solo albums he’s released since his 35th birthday, he’s amassed a cult following, and found a sense of personal peace. “I feel like I’m finally becoming self-actualized,” he says. “No one knows what they were put here for but what I do best is write rhymes, that is my gift for this world.”
A week before Ka and I meet, he is featured on the cover of the
New York Post, in a story headlined
“FLAME THROWER: FDNY captain moonlights as anti-cop rapper.” The hit-piece was surprising as much for its strange argument about Ka’s “bad-mouthing” police — which was based on a few lines from songs that were four years old, then paired with some disparaging quotes from the leader of a police union — as it was for its unlikely target: an independent rapper with a job serving his community. “Ka should be celebrated as a New York treasure,” the rapper El-P
wrote in a supportive tweet,
adding, “Before writing a hit piece it’s good to ask yourself: ‘Has the man I’m trying to destroy saved more lives than me?’”
