McKinley Dixon on his genre-bending, mystical fifth album 'Magic, Alive!' • Interview • DIY Magazine

If you’re yet to hop on the McKinley Dixon train, now would be a good time. Be warned in advance, though, that it moves at breakneck speed. There are few voices in rap quite as thrillingly ambitious as this Richmond-born Chicago native, who we last heard from in 2023 with ‘Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?’ - a record which paired emotional literacy with a taste for literature, reflecting on the Black American experience, championing the likes of Toni Morrison and Hanif Abdurraqib over sharply-crafted, jazz-inflected instrumentals.

Now, he’s reinvented himself again on fifth LP, ‘Magic, Alive!’. As the title suggests, this latest effort sees him move away from the sociopolitical to think instead about the concept of magic; what it means, the forms it takes, and the point at which it intersects with mysticism, spirituality and life itself, all while still finding room to comment on the daily reality of life in Chicago. “I feel like we’re seeing reflections of these bleaker times in art and music right now,” he explains. “And turning to magic is a new way for me to reflect on what I see every day. Whatever the concept was, it needed to be something that I could juxtapose with everyday life, and magic felt like a pretty good counterpoint.”

Even by McKinley’s standards, ‘Magic, Alive!’ sets out to wrestle with its themes in adventurous fashion; over the course of eleven tracks, he spins a story of three children mourning the death of their friend, and resolving to use magic to resurrect him. “If I was going to do something that was full of magic and wonder, it made sense to put kids in it. It made sense to write a story about the desire to live forever, because I was making a piece of art that I hope to live forever through. I didn’t want it to be a total one-for-one of my life, so I decided to make up this story - one that has aspects of me in it, but which was kind of escapist, too.”

“Turning to magic is a new way for me to reflect on what I see every day.”

There may have been another motivation for Dixon to recalibrate his lyrical lens, focusing less on his own feelings and worldview and more on abstract matters. While touring ‘Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?’ - which included making his UK debut with a slew of dates in 2023 - he found his conversations with fans to be a double-edged sword. “I do love it when people come up to me to tell me my music resonated with them,” he reflects. “But it can be a lot, it can be overwhelming, especially because I’m going back through those feelings myself when I perform. There’s more of a separation on this record. I’ve always loved a good storybook, or a good movie. So I thought, ‘why not try to create my own?’”

It’s an approach that allows him to zero in on specific scenes that reckon with what really constitutes magic, whether it’s the thrill of eluding the cops, the haze that intoxication offers us, or the mystery of a faith in a higher power. “I was aiming to be simple in feeling but complicated in expression,” he says, and he certainly pulls it off on a record that is as sonically diffuse as it is thematically complex. The jazz rhythms that have come to define his past work are still in evidence on ‘Magic, Alive!’, but there’s a significant expansion of his stylistic palette, too; this is comfortably his most genre-fluid piece to date.

“Jazz will always be the best way for me to have my conversations with music,” he says. “It’ll always be able to best mimic how I’m feeling emotionally. But I wanted to put a little bit more community into this one; I think we often know more jazz musicians by name than we do jazz bands, and so bringing in more people meant that it came off more like gospel. There’s a lot of call-and-response in the vocals. But it’s still a rap record, and there’s a little bit of punk in there too.”

“I’ve always loved a good storybook, or a good movie. So I thought, ‘why not try to create my own?’ ”

The effect is kaleidoscopic, sometimes even psychedelic; throughout ‘Magic, Alive!’, there’s always the sense that the tracks are always teetering on just the right side of chaos. In keeping with his desire to foster a sense of community, he brings in a range of collaborators for feature spots, both returning (Ghais Guevara, Teller Bank$) and new (Shamir). There’s also a key production contributor in Sam Yamaha, a Londoner who sent, unsolicited, some beats that McKinley himself had inspired; he then headed to the UK to work with Sam, laying the groundwork for the record.

“That’s one of the contradictions of this album; that I was trying to bring a community feel to it, but also distance myself from the community in a way, by bringing in new people,” explains McKinley, who once again decamped to his native Richmond, Virginia for the actual recording of ‘Magic, Alive!’ “It’s really important if you’re going to have a discography that isn’t stale. I have such a close bond with a lot of my collaborators; there’s an intimate synergy there, and when I go back to Richmond to make a record, the sense of comfort and familiarity is a beautiful thing. So, I’m very selective about who I work with, but I got the sense Sam can hold his own; he moved with such a substantial idea of what this record should sound like. He freshened things up.”

Perhaps the location most central to the album, though, is Chicago itself. McKinley’s music has always felt imbued with a sense of his personal geography; raised in Maryland, he’s spent stints in Queens, New York and Richmond before landing in the Windy City ahead of the release of ‘Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?’. “This record is the first snapshot I’ve taken of Chicago. In the past, I often felt like I was writing as if I were back in Virginia, even if I wasn’t physically there. But Chicago inspired me; I love it here. It’s a beautiful, complicated city, and there are so many moments that feel like magic here, especially in the summertime. It’s so alive, and you can feel it buzzing. My lyrics are always inspired and influenced by whatever I’m seeing, wherever I’m at.”

As McKinley gears up to release the album, a year on from having finished it, one big question still remains: after so much exploration, through storytelling and introspection, does he feel he’s figured out what magic really means as a concept? “I think magic is the intersection of luck, timing, your connection, how you move through the earth, and your intention,” he says, after a pause. “It’s not something that’s necessarily spiritual or religious, because it’s inherent. I think there’s a spiritual element to it, but when I talk about religion in my music, it comes from a place of it being confusing, overbearing, and daunting. So I prefer to think of magic as something that is fast. It’s lightning - full of wonder and danger.”

‘Magic, Alive!’ is out now via City Slang.

#AD