Critics tend to think big-picture when it comes to hip-hop reminiscent of an older tradition. They question what it means to Bring New York Back, whether the early-mid-1990s looms too large over a genre and a lifestyle that never stops evolving, and if there’s a point in reviving a moment that’s almost universally agreed upon to be impossible to replicate. But lost in that debate is the smaller, more individual picture: what it means for specific artists with their own sets of expectations and influences to come to terms with their formative experiences.
The rapper Ka came up as a 1970s baby out of Brownsville, New York, a crucial place and age to live through a wave of creative revolution that spanned from Slick Rick to Wu-Tang and onwards. But as he’s mentioned in recent interviews, he didn’t feel like he was at the ideal talent level to put in his own voice. He’s been quick to self-identify as the weak link in Brooklyn crew Natural Elements, he’s chalked up the stalled career of his one-12"-wonder group Nightbreed (1998’s “2 Roads Out the Ghetto”) to being overwhelmed in a talent-rich field of peers, and he hung up his mic for the better part of the 2000s out of a combination of frustration and personal day-job necessity. By the time 2008’s Iron Works finally got his career catalyzed again after years of struggling with his own creative ambivalence, the means of expression he carried with him for most of his life had the added weight of a well-documented style’s celebrated past.
But Ka’s an artist who's put a lot of thought into what it means to be a rapper past your thirties, and Grief Pedigree is an album that puts a lot of weight behind the wisdom of age and experience. Fittingly enough, it’s the kind of record that takes a bit of experience to really sink in. Ka’s voice is a bit subdued, often affectless, and quietly straightforward—not an easy way to get a fickle listener’s attention. You can get a grasp of his thought process and the nuanced emotions that drive them, but the thousand-yard-stare flow that clinically unspools incidental corner-hustle details is the same one that mourns lost friends, holds on tight to the thankful moments, and claims his own resilient parcel of Brooklyn hip-hop territory. It might take some dedicated listens for opinions on that flow to shift from “deadpan and repetitive” to “focused and hypnotic,” so the more immediate draw in the meantime is his lyricism. And these are the kinds of verses that stand out bluntly in the cold light of a matter-of-fact flow, giving equal time to agile internal rhymes and frank, unobscured sentiment.
On the surface, you could thematically peg Ka on a continuum that ranges from Mobb Deep’s bleak threats to the sinister comedy of crucial collaborator Roc Marciano; the latter's complement paid off on Marcberg’s “We Do It” and gets a returned favor here on the defiantly survivalist “Iron Age.” (An announced upcoming team-up, Metal Clergy, is both inevitable and promising.) But there’s more introspection and ambivalence at work, the sense of a man who’s survived a lot but still feels like there’s little he can control about his own destiny. That ambivalence stands out in a self-contained moment like “Decisions,” a for-the-seeds track that underscores just how much can hinge on a single judgment (“Blood or Crip/Honor my moms, or who I’m thuggin’ with/Is this lust or do I love this shit/Keep it gutter, or get butter dip”) without getting didactic about which path's always the correct one.
It also scatters conflicting emotions across tracks in a way that ties them together, like how the bravado in “Cold Facts” is inseparable from spiritual self-doubt and regret. It’s the kind of lyricism that doesn’t technically need hooks, but benefits from the care put into them anyways—the almost shellshocked way the fatalist refrain of “Summer” plays out in particular is especially hard to shake (“This goin’ be the summer they come for me/Guns for me/Tryin’ to put food in my young tummies/This goin’ be the summer the cops get me/Shots fit me/Tryin’ to push whips off lots swiftly”). And once the words work their way in, that delivery starts to feel more and more like a pure expression of low-key intensity.
Finding a blatantly 1995 precedent for the juxtaposition of Ka’s stark voice and similarly stark production is a bit trickier than it seems, though—he’ll spot you the odd 1970s Hi Records loop (“No Downtime”), but even with a full litany of circa-D.I.T.C. sounds to compare it to there’s still something a bit more contemporary at work. There’s not much that really knocks nonstop in the way golden-age, Hot 97–geared classics intended—imagine the insomniac feel of Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Pt. 2 interstitial “Pyrex Vision” dissipating across 37 lean, hazy minutes—but that’s by design, and in the right mindset it can be as devastatingly evocative as any speaker-rattling break.
A number of the loops are simple but well-chosen: an icy, twinkling guitar/electric piano lick for the reverie of “Every...”; a woozy,swaying bell/wah-wah concoction to back up the tightly-knotted verses on “Collage”; a couple stray chords reverbed to the point of decay on “Cold Facts.” It’s as though he found a way to build an entire production backbone off the parts of records that lead up to the big crescendos, and that looped all-prelude-no-payoff feel is the kind of friction the album needs for its confessional release to hit home. Yet, as uncomplicated as these beats are, something about them sticks in a way that leads to the suspicion that they come from well-worn records that Ka listened to hundreds of times long before he even got the idea to sample them. And, if sticking with music for a while doesn’t pay off immediately, that only makes it more of a revelation when it finally does.
