McKinley Dixon

In September 2024, McKinley Dixon was browsing a small Portland bookstore when he stumbled upon a benevolent omen: a thumb-worn but intact copy of Grant’s Annual of Magic, a compendium of card tricks, spells, and ruses printed nearly a century earlier by U.F. Grant. It had been made not far from Dixon’s new spot in Chicago, and it represented an early attempt to demystify magic, to turn sleight of hand into something you could actually see and take with you. (That Grant descended from a popular American president didn’t, of course, hurt.) The mission spoke to Dixon, who had just finished a breathless and ebullient new album where he tried to do much the same—drag magic into hip-hop, to give the genre’s on-the-ground reportage a new sense of the mystical and the possible. It is the power source for Dixon’s most imaginative record yet, the irrepressible Magic, Alive! Dixon has been making albums for the better part of a decade, turning his experiences as a native Southerner sometimes living in Queens and an eager student of literature into vivid reflections on joy, pain, and perseverance. His breakthrough, though, began with 2021’s much-loved For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her and continued with 2023’s Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?, both instrumentally rich exercises in storytelling wrapped up in the trauma and grief of losing a young friend. Those albums were emotional expurgations, Dixon dumping his feelings into marathons of literary references where Toni Morrison and Greek mythology shared space with detailed personal reflections. But it all became too much, especially when Dixon would step off stage after emptying himself into the microphone only to find others emptying their own grief back onto him. It was a blessing, sure, the way people connected to these songs, but it was exhausting, too. How could he continue to rap about what he felt, he wondered, without giving so much of himself and his own grief away? He could, of course, write a story, like a comic book set to brilliant sound. “I believe that the way to live forever is to write stuff that is dedicated to children,” he says. “Having this story feature kids made sense, because I could start at a point and end at never. I’m still growing.” In many ways, Magic, Alive! continues the work of its predecessors: It is the story of three kids who lose their best friend and wrestle with the subsequent turmoil. The essential twist, though, is that the trio wonder what they can do to bring their pal back or, at the very least, reconvene with him, so that their friendship does not end with mortality. This is where McKinley Dixon’s magic comes alive in a multitude of ways. Indeed, the crux of these 11 songs is a broad contemplation of what constitutes magic at all. Why can’t it be the guy who simply gets away with something by ducking from authorities, or the slippery way the world starts to feel after a long pull on a joint or a slow drink from a bottle? Can it merely be the belief in something we cannot plainly see just as well as an abiding trust in miracles, spells, and portals for something beyond our own experience? On Magic, Alive!, Dixon—a son of the ghost-haunted South, who keeps his plastic-covered copy of Grant’s Annual of Magic on an apartment shelf loaded with fellow talismans—says yes to all of it. To backtrack toward more earthbound concerns, Magic, Alive! began to spring to life when Dixon received an unexpected email from an English producer named Sam Yamaha. Dixon’s early beats had inspired Yamaha’s own nascent work, and he wanted Dixon to listen. Before long, Dixon rendezvoused with him in London, digging through his archive to find a wealth of beats that resonated with his own approach and with the burgeoning concept for Magic, Alive! In July 2024, Dixon returned to his native Richmond, Virginia, with a tranche of sounds from Sams Yamaha and Koff, with whom he’d worked before. “It’s like a celebration when I make a record back in Richmond,” he says. “Everybody has grown, but now here we are together again.” Alongside a cavalcade of guests and friends, from the mighty singer Anjimile and imaginative Alabama emcee Pink Siifu to trombonist Reggie Pace and harpist Eli Owens, Dixon split these beats wide open, adding hooks and horn lines and guest spots. He strung several songs together, too, so that Magic, Alive! moves like a dream or, at the very least, an alternate reality where new rules reign. Magic, Alive! functions and flourishes through its own logic. To wit, “Recitatif” begins with Iowa’s Teller Bank$ offering a taunt in a menacing and motorized voice over gentle harp and piano; it ends nearly four minutes later with his delirious verse over a gnarly bit of industrial metal, the bass and drums spinning like runaway race cars. Between those points, Dixon relays stories of Black inheritance, about the way the past ripples beneath everything in the present. Then there’s the start-stop-and-swivel dynamics of “A Crooked Stick,” with saxophones and electronics shrieking and squiggling over thundering drums as Dixon trades verses with Alfred. and Ghais Guevara. A dazzling bit of psychedelic fusion, “We’re Outside, Rejoice!” is a celebration first of the moment and then of new frontiers, of exploring the world to inform how you understand home. “Hoping what I brought back is enough to redeem,” Dixon offers over crystalline keys and spiraling sax. And with its darting flutes and big strings, the cinematic “Listen Gentle” is Dixon’s love letter to magic itself, or to the idea that we can outstrip our own limitations and woes so long as we believe in that idea. It is a sad song about triumph or a triumphant song about sadness, depending on which side of the magical funhouse mirror you take. “My target audience is everyone with heart,” Dixon roars in the second verse of “Run Run Run Part II,” a relentless number where tragedy starts to sublimate into hope, just maybe. “Came a long way from ripping heads off at the start.” He hits the line so quickly that it can feel like a fleeting thought, but it gets to the spiritual and social core of Magic, Alive! At least most of us want to live in a world where our sense of possibility only increases, where magic in whatever form we decide it might take can rearrange our understanding of everyone around us. Maybe it’s not possible to raise a friend from the dead, to lift him through the floorboards of existence like some divine being. But Dixon’s larger point here is an insistence that you believe in something more than you can hold, see, hear, or read in the day’s doomed headlines; magic is everyday and everywhere, he insists, so long as you give yourself permission to reimagine what is imaginable. “We ran, we danced/Survived, we thrived,” Dixon exalts in the last moments of the title track, chuckling wondrously over joyous saxophone and sprung bass. “That’s Magic, Alive!”