Ka rose through the ranks quickly. According to a longtime friend named Scar, he had disappeared when he was studying for his entrance exams, then scored high on both the physical and the written portions of the test. The performance was prodigious, but when I ask Ka about it, he responds with modesty. “There was dudes that was smarter than me,” he says. “My family just was proud of me that I was moving up in the ranks so fast. You know, hood law is like ‘Yo, Ka is shooting up! He only been on this long and he’s this, that, and the third!”

By 2003, after a few years of his waning interest in rhyming, Ka quit rapping. “I dedicated my life to fucking being an MC, now I’m a failure? That shit is crazy!” he says. “But my age started getting up there. It was a diss like, ‘Ayo, you're a 30-year-old rapper.’ It was disrespectful, but I bought into that. I was just tryna not be a 30-year-old rapper.”

Leaving his art behind wasn’t so simple, though, and after two years of silence Ka decided to pick rapping back up. It was his lifeblood; he was heartbroken to have it out of his life. “I was very sad,” he says. “I felt like I honed a skill for so many years for absolutely nothing. And when I saw that the lyrical aspect of hip-hop was diminishing, it left an even bigger hole. I needed to fill it, to record to fill the void for myself and many others that felt the same.”

His wife, Mimi — who’d gone from the radio station to become the editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine, and now works as creative director of Pharrell’s media company iamOTHER — was the one who encouraged him to return to making music. Apart from music, they’d built a life together. They own a home together, and though he has no children of his own, Ka parents many people, just like his father did: his baby cousin Shania and his godchildren Ashley, Tyrone, and Chase (ages 21, 14, and 4 respectively).

Mimi and Ka officially got together the same year he quit rapping, and at first he kept his aspirations a secret. “I was leery of introducing her to it: everybody and their mother rhymes,” he says. “Just because you cook doesn’t mean you’re a chef.” But eventually, it came out. She told him that it wasn’t about a record deal, but about him finding joy in his art — which, as an industry insider, she judged to have merit. “She obviously knows music,” he says. “She was the first one to put Lil Wayne on the cover; this woman knows hip-hop. So for her to say: ‘Yo, no, you good,’ it was like, ‘Word? Don’t just say that because you like me.’ It made me feel good, a real writer telling me as an artist that I’m of worth. It was the first time I heard that,” Ka says.

Ka released his debut solo album, Iron Works, in 2008, and it wound up in the hands of none other than GZA. Word got back to Ka that the Wu-Tang Clan member wanted to collaborate, and he wound up with a guest feature on the track “Firehouse” from GZA’s Pro Tools. Ka hasn’t slowed down since.

Rather than holding him back, firefighting gives Ka’s music career clarity of purpose. He is basically a one-man enterprise, single-handedly mailing out his own CDs and records, finding his own beats to sample, and working with one engineer to put out his work. He knows Stamps.com backwards and forwards, and fills out each customs form for international orders himself. All of his CDs are $10, with vinyl copies at $20 — the height of DIY accessibility.

“I record very different from a lot people,” he says. “They come into the studio to bullshit, you know. I worked overtime for this money, it’s blood money. I do a 12-hour studio session.” As a firefighter, he spends 24-hour shifts at the station, and by comparison, staying alert for 12 — what might be a near impossible challenge for most people — is par for the course. “When I’m in [the studio], I haven’t been in for over a year, usually. So I get as much done in that first session as I can, come back do another 12-hour clip, go home, listen and figure out what I need to repair.” Ka records at The End, a Greenpoint studio that’s right on the water, with views of the entire Manhattan skyline. Chris Pummill, his engineer, jokes that Ka has never been up to the roof, easily the building’s best feature, because he is so laser-focused when he works.