For Brownsville Ka, Or For Black Boys Who Considered Suicide On the L Train to Canarsie

A grief playlist for my favorite cult rapper

"Silent Killers"

Brownsville Ka died making rap music. I'm sure he died because he was making rap music. For Black men, dying young is a rule, not an exception. I'm told we face many silent killers. So experts don't cry for us. We are meant to die struggling, bereft, youth still pulling at us. We are immutable numbers, dark and accepted.

According to gloomy stats and my doctor, I’m a walking risk factor. The air is dirtier where I live. Since I'm more likely to have high blood pressure, I do. The borders of Brownsville, Brooklyn outline this trans-African morbidity and Ka understood that. His music and lyrics remained resolute, cutting. I live a mile away from his stomping grounds, sometimes at peace with this. Mostly afraid.

Ka rapped unafraid. He rhymed like each couplet eased a gun barrel a millimeter off his uvula. He rhymed like craggy gems stuffed inside in a vault. He rebuked slant rhyme for direct darts about his end, each pen stroke a tectonic shift from joyous to fatal. And in courting death, he helped me embrace the mundane dread of living while Black and male. Lungs compressed under the gargoyle claw of that monster grief. I didn't know him. I took him as he was, a grief doula with poetic verses for people like me. But not me specifically.

Then why does it hurt me so bad that he's dead?

I think it’s because I dance around words. Guilty of purple prose, I bumble through words that don’t cut butter while trying to describe a knife blade.

"Unexpectedly"

When I read the post that Ka had passed, I called a rapper who's also my brother. I didn't know what else to do but this ritual. If a rapper under 60 died, one called the other. Called crying over Sean P, Phife, DOOM, DMX and other gone-too-sooners who survived middle age but no more than that. Fossilized in perpetual hard youth.

With Ka, a legend he'd known once, it felt personal. Our OG was dead and the enormity laughed at us. I called the rapper who's my brother and who I say "I love you" to each time we hang up. I dialed because I don't know how long we have and I believe, silently, that rap will kill him.

"I was at the show and we were in the green room. It's crazy we had just spoken up his name," he waxed.

My brother talks about invocations, inherent to rap music but undervalued and unmentioned. I worry we're causing these early deaths in our conversations about rappers gone too soon. We are killing them with cynical mantras, chanting nasty death spells. Somewhere in California, they’d invoked Ka, just after he’d died somewhere back East.

You’re nobody til somebody kills you. Many men wish death upon me. Suicidal thoughts. Ready to die. Fourteen when I started consuming, death’s soundtrack sunk into me.

But I don't want to think about murdering rappers I love so I return to the ritual. I take steps to delimit grief's vacuum force. Like Ka, the repetition matters. The taut muscle torqued from returning to schemes matters. The resistance to sprawl, the urgency to live inside a pattern calls me. I needed to play his songs to death.

His not-yet-obituary on Instagram read:

"We are heartbroken to announce the passing of Kaseem Ryan, the rapper and producer known as Ka, who died unexpectedly in New York City..."

I struggled through the intestinal rage of "unexpectedly." The wily use of an adverb that betrays who expects what and why. I am always expecting to die in New York City, ground down to a few dusty cigar leaves meandering into a sewer. In Ka's lyrics, the death waltz called to me like 1998 winter.

I used to peer over the fence of the L train platform at Broadway Junction, curious about leaping off the 40-foot plateau into cold asphalt.

The far-off ball courts lulled me with swishes out of morbid fantasies only to swing back as the train approached. I was never brave enough to jump, never convicted enough to give a first/last kiss to the hurtling train lights ahead.

My cowardice came from not seeing enough life or death to make a call either way. But years later, I heard Grief Pedigree, the album that made Ka into more than a local myth. His bars invited me into stories of a onetime criminal who reflected on mistakes and, with credos, timestamped his demise. I wondered what had kept him from dying, especially back in those days he was robbing and dealing.

"Grief Kit"

As with other endless losses, I stacked a playlist of songs to house an unruly beast. This scattered equipment propels me through fearing death.

In order, I’d consume these four songs from the start of 2012’s Grief Pedigree and 2024’s Thief Next to Jesus over and over:

1. Cold Facts

2. No Downtime

3. Summer

4. Collection Plate

It's like he remarried death over and over in his bars so, in revisiting this quartet, I kept seeing my own. The lyrics spirited into my brain. Lines I didn't know had affected me until I had to write about their meaning. My own little grief kit.

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A white editor of a music site was publishing odes to Ka and I was silly enough to think, "If anything, I should write one. For Brooklyn." So I wrote an imploding piece, an essay choking on sorrow I tried to sweeten on the way down. I hated myself for writing so broadly and sweetly, and hated him for calling me on it. His cult status and journalism bona fides conferred some authority to arbitrate Black artists’ elegies, I guess. But his harsh edits tore through me and left no words untouched.

I kinda felt like he was hating, hung up on phrases that weren’t his to edit or choose. Like “morbid.” He said Brownsville Ka wasn’t morbid. When I wrote “courting death” back in that third paragraph you read, the editor disagreed. And after a small back-and-forth, I knew, intuitively, he didn’t respect my choices, and that my tribute wasn’t for someone like him.

The exchange rattled me though. I believed, for a moment, I wasn't one to write about Ka. Or our constant dark thoughts. I was another Black man doomed to die young in a dying town. What did I know about an artist touching thousands of lives, nothing like mine?

Except Ka left hints for morbid Black Brooklynites, who imagined our deaths replayed on an intrusive loop. Who forecasted space heaters set on fire. Who park blazes suffocated and killed. When I wrote the lyrics down, it became obvious. He was trying to tell me that the details of death didn’t matter, only that it reigned. Listen again.

All gloom/Small room/No range of motion.

• My chest cavity lives inside this tightness. Lonely and constrained.

Was often obliged to say, if I died today, I wouldn’t care.

This gon' be the summer they come for me.

• Echoed in my head as I trotted Park Place, mouthing the words right by the man who sleeps at the library.

We, never at ease, no downtime.

• Rattled my sleep two nights before the new year. I never take a proper holiday from anxiety sirens, subway elbows, and smelly fog.

If Roc Marciano rapped his way into Ralph rugbies, jewel-bedecked wrists, Ka rapped his way out of creased sneakers and disheveled parkas. If billy woods rapped freedom cries from the front lines of the avant garde, Ka rapped behind the gleam of gold cages. And not that they’re too different. Their work was in conversation with each other. And with me. But I never ran the streets, I ran from them.

Ka verses were angels and demons in a play I only saw. But he embodied my concrete brand of urban paranoia. Certainty that life would push me onto the tracks. That death would refuse my protests. In New York, there's always more to do. Then death snatches you.

Epilogue

Kaseem Ryan died from unknown causes. Tragically and unexpectedly. But he gave the gift of death in a roving catalogue of Brooklyn street walks and suicidal escapes.