#365songs (21 / 365)

"Dr. Yen Lo" is the name for the collaboration between Ka, an incredibly good and unique rapper who died in 2024, and DJ Preservation. Preservation is one of my favorite rap producers because all the shit he's done in the last, like, decade has sounded like Days with Dr. Yen Lo: dark, spare beats often with few or no drums that sound somehow antique. They are the perfect things for Ka to rap over, in the husky, weathered near-whisper that he rarely strays from as he delivers bars incredibly dense with internal rhymes and multiple meanings.

The album's strange title refers to a character in the film "The Manchurian Candidate," which I don't know anything about beyond the broadest strokes of the plot. But you don't need to know the film to appreciate Days, which mostly uses it as a framing device for Ka to rap about the topic he returns to semi-obsessively across his whole catalog: grappling with a childhood spent in precarity and the things he did to survive it, and trying to transcend it to live a decent, moral life as an adult.

Days with Dr. Yen Lo is incredibly cohesive in sound, and the titles of the tracks (all of which are "Day N" for some value of N) don't make it easy to distinguish them. So why did I pick "Day 811?" Probably just so I could quote the 5/5 tinymixtapes review of the album, which demonstrates why I still like to read writing about music: sometimes it has an insight like this that makes me appreciate an album or a song in a new way.

On “Day 811,” Ka spits, “When you’re raised around rage and vengeance/ You can change, but in your veins remains major remnants.” It’s the type of rhyme that, coming from someone else, might be used to put an exclamation point on an entire song, an “Oh shit!” moment typically reserved for the end of a track. From Ka, it’s bars 13 and 14 of a 24-bar verse.