Despite a dance music career now stretching into its third decade, it’s rare for the man born Kenny Dixon, Jr. to grant an interview. But in 2010, Moodymann sat down for a now-legendary talk with the Red Bull Music Academy, and while the bon mots he drops across its two hours are legion—"My bitches and my hoes is my MPCs, my SP-1200, my bass, my keyboards"; "Detroit is a dying city; well, I’m going to die with that motherfucker"; "Hell, I thought Kraftwerk was four niggas"—whoever watched the video came away with only one image: The entourage of African-American women who walk in with him and twist his unruly afro into braids onstage and then pass Hennessy around to the audience.
This strategy of misdirection has cemented Dixon’s legacy in house music while also keeping his mystery intact. I’ve seen him DJ with a black veil over his face or else a hoodie pulled tight, keeping attention off of him. A set of disco and house can easily veer into White Stripes, Led Zeppelin, and Nirvana before swerving back. The cover of 2014’s self-titled album portrayed him as a house slipper-wearing, Solo cup-swigging layabout while the music within slyly touched on heartbreak and urban decay. With his first officially licensed mix CD, for the 51st entry in the DJ-Kicks series, one might expect a set of dusty disco and deep house, but Dixon confounds expectations throughout, detouring at peak moments, going left where he might build momentum, all of it leading to luminous results.
Whether he alights on underground hip-hop (Dopehead), vocodered soul (Talc), quiet storm psychedelia, or skittering, looping grooves (Jitwam), Moody moves at a flâneur’s pace, easeful yet determinedly at his own leisure and meter. Beats might never accelerate beyond headnod speeds, but Moodymann continually changes up the drums: crisp snares drop into swinging hi-hat patterns, Brazilian congas into Rich Medina’s kickdrums back into smoky downtempo, with fellow Detroit producer Andrés’ contribution adding a Latin flare to the mix. The first half posits an alternate history of 21st century soul and R&B: Passing over well-known acts, he finds jewels in the shadows, like the Pied Pipers’ remix of "Can’t Hold Back" and Julien Dyne’s "Stained Glass Fresh Frozen," and places them alongside tracks by Flying Lotus and Jai Paul.
It’s 16 tracks in before the BPMs enter disco territory, with Rodney Hunter’s "Uptown Tricks" remix of the Fort Knox Five. But not even two minutes later, that momentum veers into the solemn solo guitar of José González, who sings "we’ll remain after everything’s been washed away." From there, Moodymann picks it back up, from the quickening future jazz of "Tag Team Triangle" to the deep house of Joeski, and where other producers might lose or confuse a crowd with such temperamental switches, Moodymann holds us calmly in the palm of his hand. Who else would suss out a Kings of Tomorrow track from 2013 (stuck on a CDR promo no less), some 20 years after their '90s heyday, to push the mix to its ecstatic peak? But that’s exactly what he does on "Fall for You."
He again deviates from trajectory for a dramatic, beatless reading of Anne Clark’s "Our Darkness." For Detroiters who grew up on legendary radio jockey the Electrifying Mojo, this proto-techno spoken word track is a classic, the type of brooding synth-pop track (what you’d now deem darkwave) that in the early '80s music blurred the color lines on the dancefloor. Dropping a live, piano-only version here, Moody harkens back to his Detroit roots, and Clark’s lines about "[an] idealistic assurance that…we'd keep our heads above the blackened water/ But there's no room for ideals in this mechanical place" are particularly resonant. Clark’s song rails against detachment as a means for surviving in the modern era, of keeping ideals intact in the face of insurmountable odds. It might sound like an outlier in the mix, but it doubles as Dixon Jr.’s own outlook. "I am not the hottest motherfucking DJ in the world," is how Moody put it during his RBMA lecture. "I am not going to play the hottest tracks in the world, but what I will do is give you the truth on them turntables."
