McKinley Dixon is on one hell of a run. Ever since dropping Who Taught You to Hate Yourself? and The Importance of Self Belief back-to-back in 2018, the Virginia-raised, Chicago-based rapper has periodically released the best rap novel of all-time—only to one-up himself again two or three years later on the next. He’s been skyrocketing for nearly half-a-generation, chronicling the poetry of the world like he’s got Frank O’Hara’s eye and June Jordan’s vocab. His processing is a mode of time travel, his songs are disinterested in forgoing brutality for the sake of safety. Songs like “Run, Run, Run” and “Tyler Forever” are sun-dappled, street-corner proverbs—depictions of violence, Blackness, and friendship staged in the literary. And Dixon’s sonic come-up is a feat of its own: The horns that underlined “Circle the Block” seven years ago keep getting more muscular; his flow, once lo-fi and monotone on a track like “The Everyday People,” is louder and closer to the mic. What makes Dixon such a rap bona fide in 2025 is how his tongue is a museum. Listening to his music, you can learn a thing or two about love and consequence, about the line of survival blurred in-between. He tends to Black art by approaching his albums like memoirs.
In 2021, his breakthrough LP For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her denounced martyrdom by bringing everyone in on the riches, be it Teller Bank$, Alfred., Michah James, or Abby T. Dixon wrote for and to the women in his life, about the mortality of his elders in the context of him and his friends just trying to get by (“Chain Sooo Heavy”). His kinfolk are the tastemakers (“make a poet Black”), and the big door prize is feeling alive (“Bless the Child”). Four years ago, Dixon looked at how white art culled from trauma is praised and began unpacking why Black creators who search for accolades from God-playing think-tanks are asked to be sadomasochistic while conversing with their own turmoils. He turned the camera even further inward on 2023’s Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?—an album inspired by the Roots and Dream Warriors, hellbent on outrunning the system, and generous for how much tenderness it finds in the dimmest pockets of living.
Magic, Alive! is McKinley Dixon’s fifth album, and it’s also the biggest risk he’s taken yet—a collection of tracks always flirting with overproduction and clutter. The music is brimming with orchestration; it’s not “everything but the kitchen sink,” but “everything and the kitchen table.” Dixon isn’t afraid to add more voices and hands into his musical soup, and each song is an elixir of jazz-rap, with pockets layered in chain-link grandeur. Every chapter of Magic, Alive! is bigger than him, yet his verses focus on the micro with historical hip-hop citations, literary allusions, and horror films metabolized into heady sonic palettes. Like the illustrations he animates in his spare time, the rarely-pedantic Dixon meticulously sketches expressions of people he both knows and imagines. His lyrical fascinations with mythology are decorated in rare and endangered fits of orchestral patterns; the noisy percussion, mechanical poetry, and blood-boiling strings haunt the magic Dixon is chasing in the epilogue of Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?’s block-bending cynicism but never smear it. As he raps on “Listen Gentle”: “It’s tragic, trying to keep my kindness in my steps with lightning in my eyes.”
Magic, Alive! is a conceptual, allegorical achievement—a story of three young kids whose friend passes away, the monuments they build in his memory, and the lives they’d kill themselves to restore. To preserve the light of a loved one, Dixon assembled a guest list featuring both veterans of his catalogue and green players who’ve been running in nearby circles, including Quelle Chris, Anjimile, Ghais Guevera, Alfred., Teller Bank$, ICECOLDBISHOP, Pink Siifu, Blu, and Shamir. “Watch My Hands” begins in a familiar neighborhood scene: little homies wearing beaters in a hot summer, watching the world “from the back of a bike.” Dixon raps so nonchalantly you can hear him laugh at the head of the first verse and, while the resonance of Eli Owens’ harp glistens, he puffs out his chest: “Be as strong as the concrete, but as fragile as when it and ya knees kiss.” Softness clots in “A Crooked Stick” and its aftermath, when Dixon declares himself “alive through close calls” and meets his own survival and curse defiance with an “I guess.” In the miscellany of jousting saxophones and walloping drums before and after Dixon, Alfred. raps about TikTok dances, Rick Ross ad-libs, and “NPC white noise, blip-blop.”
McKinley Dixon sinks his teeth into the Magic, Alive! story on “We’re Outside, Rejoice!,” as he summons a concrete pastoral again but doesn’t wear out its meaning. There are far too many front doors still unopened on his turf to stop painting the neighborhood just yet. A tint of blue washes over the brotherhood at the song’s core: “I love laying with you here in the grass, feels like it was just us in the worlds that passed.” Dixon speaks in Toni Morrison titles while seeking redemption and clinging to memories the bodies around him have sung into life. “My face inhales the sun, grab your hand with no plan then we run!”
“Sugar Water,” which features Quelle Chris and Anjimile, a song exploring the weight of the dead we carry within. illuminati hotties’ Sarah Tudzin playing bursts of compressed, poppy guitar, coating the gospel harmonies and widescreen rhythms with a veneer of rock glam. Dixon explores the dynamics of kinfolk with an epic delivery. “Sun been getting its revenge,” he raps. “Feel the heat, you hear it buzzing. How we raise him from the ground? Type shit discussing with my cousin.” Anjimile singing the “Can’t make my peace, I’ll give my soul to keep” chorus warms the jazz motifs, but it’s Quelle Chris’ verse that turns the song into a bar-for-bar dialogue: “My big bro told me every song you make is a picture of forever, dog. And once you let it out and spread it ‘round like aerosol, we speak your name up like you famous bro. You never lost.”
The title of the Teller Bank$-assisted “Recitatif” comes from Toni Morrison’s short story of the same name, a French word for “recitative.” McKinley Dixon takes that to heart, turning the song into a dialogue between verse and arrangement. The track paces itself on a snare-and-cymbal rhythm, as Dixon’s flow gradually ticks up in volume. A drumstick scrapes across the hoop lip while whispers of flute coil and exhale. “So hellbent on being so heaven sent,” Dixon raps. “Burning through whatever’s next, just to find out what forever meant.” Two minutes in, the beat flips and the melody crunches. Dixon’s delivery is bombastic, summoning a double entendre: “I’m tryna be everywhere that the sun is at! Red holes up in his fleece, you know that we finna drop.” Three minutes in, Dixon’s yelps gurgle like Freddy Krueger. “Run,” he tells us, before Teller’s pitch-shifted verse projectiles into view: “Them and dead is a synonym, him and him, bet this chopper spit quicker than Eminem.” “Recatitif” is an oratorio climaxing in power: “With this shogun, I’m a shogun.”
“Run, Run, Run Part II,” a sequel to the Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? track that blew up so big it landed in Chase Bank commercials and the FC25 videogame, is a medley of piano, horn, and ride cymbal splatters. Dixon’s cipher is full of Erykah Badu references and thug love. “If one day we’ll be free, keep it running,” he affirms, before reciting stanzas about enchanted wrists, target audiences, getting socked in the mouth, and the pride shared between the living and dead. The “braids for the summer” motif from “Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?” returns before Dixon substitutes the “I’m less likely to falter” line with “take ‘em out for the fall.” His language sprawls into an image of leaning houses, teething babies, and palms “reach[ing] up to God.”
The three-song finale on Magic, Alive! is the best sequence of McKinley Dixon’s career so far. Like in “Sun, I Rise” two years ago, he turns to the story of Icarus for meaning—this time in relation to the preservation of innocence that is ever-present in the gun violence of “F.F.O.L.,” where men try to outrun bullets in zig-zag patterns. Dixon measures the purpose in his writing in the same breath, calling it a “language passed down from my head to my heart to my wrist to my fist, and my fingers ignite.” The church gets more crowded on “Listen Gentle,” as a kiss of Sam Koff’s trumpet and Gina Sobel’s flute tumbles into a homegrown, odds-chasing, symphonic juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy—Dixon runs his mouth about the “real gangster’s dream” of dying beneath the stars, blocks and bugs hugging, Cadillac hums, loud cursing, and “finding ways to live forever,” and I think of what Dixon told me two years ago: “Love is not just beautiful, love is also horrible.” The Magic, Alive! title track turns the “tale we’ll become, a blaze of glory” sunset from “Listen Gentle” into a party of the immortals. Glued together by Etienne Stoufflet’s rowdy saxophone, Brandi Wellman’s ghostly coos, gang vocals, flutters of Sobel’s flute, and a rapture, Dixon praises the homies who ran, danced, and flew: “Instead of us watchin’ it all collapse, we huddle and between us a butterfly wing flaps. To live forever is to tell the stories of who light up ya eyes.”
In an attempt to make “the perfect closing credits,” Dixon calls upon Blu and Shamir to fill out “Could’ve Been Different.” The song is an ode to motherhood and keeping your city close. “Now we’re standing in the meadows, where the flowers know our name,” Shamir sings. “We ain’t run from where we grew up. Shit, we’d probably go insane. Oh, my God: I just wanna jump off the roof.” His harmonies are painted by a chugging string arrangement unfurling behind him, but “Could’ve Been Different” quickly splashes back into Teeny’s saxophone-facing-jazz instrumental underscoring Dixon’s and Blu’s verses. “Just came home, on the stoop playing dice,” the former raps. “Through screendoors, her shape forms. She died for this life, once or twice.” Magic, Alive!, like all of McKinley Dixon’s records, is nearly a dozen short stories touched by a block-wide echo. Generously, “Could’ve Been Different” conjures nearby gods, friends, strangers, and the bodies caught in-between them: “Young boy got a talent for gifting ghosts such beautiful names, still the age where this hurt to us a wonderful game. We staring out the window, pray these wings hold up our frames.” How gorgeous it is to be familiar.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
