McKinley Dixon talks MCR, Toni Morrison, and embracing community in music.
On a cool Saturday night earlier this month, rising Chicago-based rapper McKinley Dixon performed his first hometown show following the release of his most recent record, the phenomenal Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?. A small but mighty crowd populated the cozy space of Schubas Tavern that evening, ultimately proving to be an incredibly lively, engaged audience.
From the onset, Dixon’s command of the stage was palpable. He naturally embodied the emotions of his songs and flowed between them with fluid ease, all the while maintaining an infectiously jovial disposition. Notable, also, was the interaction between him and his band, who were all so blissfully immersed in the music that some moments felt like gaining a peek into a private jam session. The second half of the set saw Dixon perform the entirety of his new record, opening with the gripping words from a recording of “Hanif Reads Toni,” which then led straight into the lush “Sun, I Rise.” Surprised by the crowd’s demonstrable knowledge of the lyrics, Dixon pleasantly remarked, “Damn, y’all really listened to the record!” Other crowd favorites included the hard-hitting “Mezzanine Tippin’” and the propulsive “Tyler Forever.” Dixon’s heartfelt tribute to a late friend, “Dedicated to Tar Feather,” was another highlight. Judging from the crowd’s reaction, it is safe to say that Dixon put on a stellar show for a number of die-hard fans, and he certainly gained a good number more by the end of the night. As a send-off, the whole room lit up as we sang the final notes of the title track in unison: Beloved!! Paradise!! Jazz!!?
Dixon’s electric performance reinforced many aspects of his artistry that he eagerly unpacked with Firebird correspondent David Feigelson prior to the show. From his love of theatricality in music, to his embrace of family in all forms, Dixon’s Chicago show was a wholesome display of what makes him such a unique and appealing rapper in music today. Read the full conversation below and be sure to spin his new record, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?.
photo by Jimmy Fontaine.
David Feigelson: I know you spent some of your childhood going back and forth between Maryland and Queens. I’ve heard you have a diverse array of musical influences, but I'm curious if there's anything about the New York scene that stuck with you, or was inspiring in your childhood?
McKinley Dixon: The New York scene was kind of going through a transitional period when I was coming up. Post early 2000s, New York was like, “What’s our sound? We pioneered hip hop, then we lost it for a bit, then we came back and made the gangster—well not made it, but took influences from the West—then we lost it a little bit again.” So when I was coming up, there wasn't too much new music coming out of New York. There were always the legends in the 2000s, but accessibility to making music was not as common as it is now. What really stuck with me from New York were the moments, like watching people iconize hip hop legends on walls, hearing my grandma talk about music, and seeing my neighbors talk about it. That was what inspired me, more than the actual artists from New York, because I got nothing in common with 50 Cent. I got nothing in common with JAY-Z. And that's who it was at the time. Mos Def started, but the thing is, I didn’t really see artists like that as New York artists. Black On Both Sides came out in ‘99, and you could tell he was gonna be big, it was gonna be worldwide. That was really what it came to in New York.
DF: That makes sense. You also have many influences outside of hip hop, and some that I find particularly striking are My Chemical Romance (MCR) and Panic! At the Disco. I was thinking you might take inspiration from their theatrical ambition, which I hear coming through especially in some of the newer stuff you’ve been putting out. I’m curious if that’s accurate and if you could talk about how those influences manifest.
MD: Definitely. It was the 2000s, and I wasn't listening to rap, so I was looking for other stuff. I was very into MCR, Panic! At the Disco a little less. They had that one album, and then half of the next album, but MCR was another story. Even their most recent releases are solid.
DF: Completely agree. MCR is classic.
MD: Classic! People still aren’t putting MCR on the level of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—I’d give it another ten years. They pioneered so much of modern day rock/emo. But not only were they doing the dramatic and theatrical stuff, they were also challenging gender roles. At a young age, I didn’t really know what that meant, but it wasn't a little thing to see a magazine with a headline like, “Frank Iero And Gerard Way Dating?” It showed me that there is a way to be vulnerable, although I had to find a way to make it consensual, because that was not consensually vulnerable. So I started thinking that theatrics come with the drama, and it's not just about putting it into your music, but living it in your life too. If you’re not being vulnerable in real life, there’s no point in doing it in your music. MCR and those legends made that clear. The vulnerability was just as much present in their real lives as it was in the music—they gave themselves a hundred percent. Even Fall Out Boy a little bit, but that was mainly Pete Wentz.
DF: True but MCR is at the top in my opinion. I feel like being associated with that scene is part of why they don't get their flowers as much as they should.
MD: Exactly.
DF: I got to see them last year in Jersey and it was wonderful.
MD: That's fucking ridiculous. Legends. Absolute legends.
DF: For sure. Okay, moving a bit forward. You're located in Chicago now?
MD: Yeah! The Big Apple.
DF: Yeah, wait, wait a minute…
MD: *laughing*
Yup I’m out here in Chicago, City of Angels.
DF: Nice (I did not catch his shenanigans the second time…). I actually just left Chicago. I was at school there for four years and I feel like I came of age, musically, in that city. I got pretty familiar with a lot of the smaller venues and the local scenes. I interviewed Josh Terry a few months ago, that was super fun.
MD: Tight. Also a legend.
DF: Yeah! I think he gave you a shoutout recently. Great guy. I'm curious what your take is on the whole scene in Chicago. It seems maybe a little more communal than it might be in a place like New York or LA?
MD: Sure. So I came up in Richmond, Virginia, where I sort of knew everybody. I didn't exactly start it, but I was at the forefront of rap music when I was coming up there. That generation was like Butcher Brown, Ohbliv, and DJ Harrison. Then, after a bit of time, people like me, Mutant Academy, and Alfred. came along. So my idea of community is DIY to the death. I’ve seen bands get started, like I came up with Soul Glo. I came up with lots of artists where the only way for us to get seen was if we played at small venues that we owned ourselves. I was playing in many of these people's houses. So I think Richmond's community, albeit small, is quite special. And so many artists come from other small cities—it's overwhelming to go to New York and start your life as a twenty something year old there. I definitely got more community from Richmond growing up.
Regarding Chicago, the city has a very strong knit community, and they are less likely to isolate you than they are in New York. There it can be like, “We do not let nobody in if they're not doing this, or if they're not supplying us.” In Chicago, I know NNAMDI, Sen, KAINA, Josh, and all these people through the DIY scene. I think it also goes to show that while New York can have more of a rap and punk focus, when you have counterculture genres like that, they can take on traits of the culture that they’re against. They’re like, “We don't want you in here if you're not a certain way. We’re gatekeeping for a reason.” Good reasons sometimes, bad reasons sometimes. But Chicago is a lot more like, if you go to the show, you're gonna meet people. It's more DIY.
DF: Yeah I get that sense too. It's nice. I've heard you say something a few times—regarding releasing a number of projects, trying to gain traction—that really stuck with me. It was, “If it doesn't work, we come back with more people, and we try again.” I really like that and I was wondering if you could elaborate on it.
MD: I mean where to begin. My albums used to just be me. Then I started getting everybody in a giant band, and now everybody's listening. Beloved had about 30 musicians on it, and every single one of those musicians, besides one or two, has been on my records before. Because I came up in the Richmond scene, I've known everybody since before we were good musicians. I couldn’t do it with my first two tapes, and then For My Mama was the tip of the iceberg. It was like now people are listening. But that still had 20 musicians on it. Then for Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? I was like why don't I just bring everybody who has been through my timeline, not only to be a part of this, but also to affirm that we are all growing and going in the right direction.
I also take that into account when it comes to my lyrics. I could be rapping about myself, but that's so isolating. Why not make it seem like the viewer is with me in the car? With “Sun, I Rise,” why isn't it a coming of age movie for everybody, where we’re both waking up in the house, about to go out into the world? Why not talk about how my black queer trans friends and loved ones are still being isolated in their world, and saying that those are the real, real niggas in the street? There's no aspect of my music that I could do alone. Sure I could write it alone, but I could never live it alone. I think that's what it means when I say if it don't work the first time, you come back with more people. I'll be damned, next time I'm gonna have thirty motherfuckers on it again.
DF: Awesome. I feel like that just makes it feel all the more alive and exciting.
MD: Exactly. That's how you get the humanity in it. If I was doing it by myself, you wouldn't be able to feel the connection, the intimacy, the vulnerability. But I can bring as many people as I want into it, and we just smoke a little weed, and I'm like, “Play this horn line.” And they're like, “What if I do it like this?” And I'm like, that’s genius, I would never have had that idea.
DF: Yeah for sure. I make music as well, and I used to always write out parts for people. Now I'm much more inclined to have them come in and just do what they do over it. We’ll see what happens.
MD: Exactly, exactly.
DF: So as you bring in all this instrumentation, I'm curious what your approach is, as you blend it with the vocals. Do you tend to shape your storytelling and your delivery around what instrumentals are emerging? Or vice versa? Like do you have the vocals thought out more and then come in like, “Okay, there’s a swell here, and then we decrescendo over here…”
MD: Both. I usually write a line that inspires me, like I'll see something beautiful and I'll write it down. For example, I was in Europe recently and everybody wears uniforms over there. I didn't know that all the babies had uniforms for their schools. I saw a couple little black kids playing and it was so cute. They were playing hopscotch or something, and I just wrote this line, “Altar boys playing dice.” That then invokes so much vision; it's a short line and has this whole thing tied to it from different angles, but it's just one bar. So I have that, and I'm like, how do I want it to sound if I'm saying it? And I want it to sound grand, I want it to have a crescendo right there. So then I’ll build the instrumental, and I'll put little notes in it like, “Here's a fill… Here's a crescendo… Here's a swell…” Then I’ll move the lyric around there. So it's really a liquid process in that it just all depends. I've also been getting a lot more production from friends recently. With those, it's already set, so I just go back in and move stuff where I want it to be if I have the vocal in mind. So really the verse dictates it but the verse comes after.
DF: That makes sense. Let's move on to talk more about Beloved. I know the album takes its name after the Toni Morrison novels, and you've said that it can be thought of almost like a book, where every few songs is a new chapter. I'm curious what Morrison has meant to you in your personal or musical development, and how that manifests here.
MD: Hanif Abdurraqib said Toni Morrison is the best describer of love. I think love, to an average person, is viewed as the greatest thing ever, and even if it's not, there are overarching themes of intimacy and affection. Whereas when she writes about love, it's more so the broader sense of love of the human experience. I think she is the greatest person to tell you that love can be frustrating, it can be sad, it can be deadly, it can be beautiful, it can be harrowing, inspiring, magnificent. All these romantic, beautiful things in the same breath. That inspires me to try to encapsulate all I can about beautiful moments. It really is just a bunch of beautiful moments she puts together. And the way that she strings them along, the way she speaks on all of it, shows you that regardless of what the intention is, it's all love. It's always love, in all of her books. That's what I draw from, sans the writing, the trilogy, the person she is and she models herself after. It's just finding ways to write about love so differently, and in such a well rounded way.
DF: Lovely. You reminded me of a tweet you recently wrote about trying to find a beautiful moment every day, and that practice forcing you to find beauty in the smaller things. Is there any moment that has stuck with you?
MD: All the time. Not to get too deep into it, but I recently lost a friend to suicide. This friend was an incredible black trans woman. When I first moved to Chicago, she was here, and I went to visit her in Rogers Park. She made food for me and my partner and then we just talked at the kitchen table. I remember watching her clean up, and it inspired a lyric on “Dedicated to Tar Feather,” which was then,
A shaky hand sweeps the table from the crumbs
While a lil’ boy hopes someday, he’ll live closer to the ones
That set off explosive tongues
Saw one get killed last summer, he lift his head
Butterflies escaped his mouth from out his lungs
So these things can be simple. Even an interaction with a friend of mine, telling them I love them, that's a beautiful moment. Seeing children play in the neighborhood that I live in, Garfield Park, that’s a beautiful moment. Sometimes I be cheatin. Sometimes it's really easy, like, “Okay, I just seen a dog with another dog, that's a beautiful moment in its own way.” But a lot of the time, it’s like those little kids playing with dice, just hopscotching. That's a beautiful moment, to me, that is something I should catalog. I have so many moments that I love, and I forget so many beautiful moments every single day, and I'm lucky. I think a lot of us are lucky to have that, to be able to forget beautiful moments, because we can see them so often. A lot of people can’t.
DF: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I'm sorry for your loss.
MD: You know, the world is hard and the summer is hot. I appreciate it though. It happens.
DF: Yeah. Well, hearts out to you and your loved ones.
MD: Thank you.
DF: What does coming of age mean to you?
MD: Shit, man sometimes people try to clock me and be like coming of age is fifteen and sixteen. But honestly, coming of age for me is really when you're going into your thirties. I think we can come of age as a child, and that's a whole different thing. But I think coming of age is really when it's like, “Ah shit, I'm about to hit thirty in a couple years, where am I at? What have I come into at this age?” I really don’t think it’s limited to when you go from a child to a teen to an adolescent. It's really when you're a younger adult, slowly transitioning into the world and seeing it as someone who is a fully formed adult. So for me, coming of age is when you’re in your late twenties and you're like, “Huh, this is a real transition. It’s an event.”
DF: Interesting. On this album, a lot of the songs are shorter than on your previous projects. I'm curious what brought about that change.
MD: Cause I need to shut the fuck up! Honestly. I mean, For My Mama is great, but some of the songs are like six minutes long on that bitch, and I can't be doing that each time. That's the other reason when you bring more people on it, it sounds better. For My Mama was just me with my friends, but I was controlling all the arrangements. And I was like, I could put a sax solo on every single fucking song, and then nobody clocks me. So then the whole album is like forty five minutes because every song is six minutes long, and I'm like, “Nice.”
But with this one I wanted to change it up. I could yell at the sun all goddamn day about how I don't fuck with Spotify or streaming apps, but in actuality, it's so much easier to try to expand how you do music, not to cater to them, but to also see how you can make it within their realms. I can make a six minute long, beautiful piano ballad. But can I make a two and a half minute long, complex song with everything still in it? That's where I was going into this record. “Sun, I Rise” is a dense song that’s two and a half minutes, but I almost made that joint like six minutes, because I wanted to hear the harp forever. But at a certain point it feels self indulgent. So with this album, I tried to make dense, complex songs in less than three minutes.
DF: Yeah. I think Mark Twain wrote a letter to a friend that was like twenty pages. At the end, he said something like, “I would have written less, but I didn't have the time.”
MD: Exactly. And it's hard. I came up with all this jazz, and sax, and horns and strings. Especially when you get the resources for it, it's like, technically I could just run wild. Maybe I’ll do it on the next one because now everybody’s saying for this album, “Twenty eight minutes for ten songs, what the fuck?” But if I put twelve songs in there, they’d be like, “Actually, the middle sort of drags a bit.” You know, it’s what happens.
DF: Can't please everyone.
MD: Exactly. What am I gonna do?
DF: Yeah. Okay, you have said that this record has immeasurable importance to you and your family? What does that mean?
MD: My family is all my loved ones. I made it for me, with you in mind. If you don't process in between your records, you're not gonna make a new record. Rap can get caught in this idea that trauma makes money. That sucks, and it's hard, but it's easier to repeat that over and over again, just like the cycle of trauma in and of itself. So this is me trying to process. Not necessarily trying to heal, because you can't just make an album and just heal off of that. It's more so me trying to process these things that happened in my life. This is for my loved ones trying to process what happened in my life. The last one was for my mama, this one is for all my friends. If I am making this music for myself, what I'm trying to do is find language that is accessible for everybody that's also similar in my situation, and that could be anybody. Family could be anybody. Family is chosen. This record is for those in similar marginalized positions, to find the language they can use to explain, to have a bit more language than they had before.
DF: That's great. I want to talk briefly about your path going forward. I know you were recently in the studio with a number of people who you've mentioned throughout this interview, including NNAMDI, Pierce from Soul Glo, and Backxwash, who I'm also a huge fan of.
MD: Legends.
DF: Is that a sign of a new sonic direction? Wha’s happening there?
MD: Honestly we’re just fucking around. I’ve always loved pop punk. Like 2010s pop punk. Pop punk right now is in a state of disarray. But I love Pierce the Veil, and these artists that are legends in their own world, one that is not necessarily the world I exist in. And with Soul Glo, NNAMDI, and Backxwash, I've always wanted to work with friends. It don’t work the first time, you bring more people. That’s what it is. We’ll see, might be something, might be nothing. Takes time. Hard to get all them motherfuckers together, that's the other thing. Pierce in Philly, NNAMDI in Chicago, Backxwash in Toronto. It’s hard, but we’re making it work, we’re having fun with it.
DF: Yeah when it happens it's special. You got any dream collabs?
MD: Shit, I mean I got artists that I would love to work with that are obtainable, and then there’s artists like Isaiah Rashad. He’s not unobtainable, but where the fuck is he? I want to work with Schoolboy Q. Where the fuck is Schoolboy Q? How do you even get in contact with somebody at that level? I would love to work with, well, shit we don’t really fuck with him no more but Kanye West. Not on this tip, whatever tip he’s on now. But six years ago maybe. You know, artists like that, artists that I idolized from afar. Honestly, there's nobody rapping better than Ghais, Alfred., Teller Bank$, Micah James, people that I've worked with for so long. I could put a big feature on there, but it'd be a little weird if it was just randomly like, oh, it's motherfucking Lil Wayne. I mean, maybe it wouldn't be weird, but it'd be like, what the fuck is that? But I really wanna work with everybody. I’d really like to work with Brittany Howard. Spellling will be cool. Yves Tumor would be awesome.
DF: Oh, yeah. For sure.
MD: Yeah, that's that good shit. But them motherfuckers is not gonna work with me, because I'm a regular shmegular person, and they’re literally like, “What if we put the harp over the electronic beat and then make it turn into glitch hop?” I'm just like, I don't even know how you think about that. I can't even imagine. But yeah, I’d love to be working with everybody.
DF: I don't think you're as far off as you see yourself.
MD: I appreciate that. I'm just like, Yves Tumor made that album and nobody's talking about it. But it's a fucking crazy album.
DF: So good. I went to their show in Chicago this year.
MD: Fucking crazy.
DF: Insane. And the stage design and all of the visuals, nuts.
MD: Yes. Fucking crazy. Nobody's talking about that record, though. I never hear anyone mention it, which is so absurd.
DF: Yeah. You seem like a big music fan, in touch with the current scene as well as a lot of older stuff. Do you have any recommendations for those reading this interview, things you've been listening to a lot recently?
MD: Let's check it out. I'm gonna open up my Spotify. Listen to Spanish Love Songs. I really like their last record, Brave Faces Everyone. Black Milk’s new record is really good. I love Sweet Pill, their album Where the Heart Is is great. And as always, Pierce the Veil. Selfish Machines.
DF: That's great. I was curious if you listen to SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE?
MD: Yeah! It's not as gripping for me, but I do love them. They’re all really great people too, I knew them from my stint on Saddle Creek records. I really like them. They're in the vibe of like Strange Ranger, yeah?
DF: Oh I’m not sure, I don't know them. But SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE dropped a couple of songs a few days ago. I listened to them last night and they caught my ear, and also with this interview on the horizon, I felt like it'd be something you might fuck with.
MD: I'll check it out. I fuck with them. They're definitely the type that drops a record, and then is real goofy in between, and then comes back and drops another record that's crazy.
DF: Yeah. Awesome. I think that’s everything, thanks so much for your time.
MD: Yeah I appreciate you. Thank you David.
preface by Alia Smith, interview by David Feigelson.
edited by Kristen Wallace.
photo by Jimmy Fontaine.