McKinley Dixon: Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? review – literary, urgent rap

Richmond, Virginia rapper McKinley Dixon broke out in 2021 with For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her, a lush collection of expansive jazz-rap tracks that made great use of his elastic flow. From bar to bar, he could shift gears from laconic and unbothered to tense and tetchy; the album’s improvisation-heavy production let Dixon stretch out and play, ducking and weaving through wandering upright bass and noodling horns.

Dixon’s fourth album tightens its lens: skipping by in 30 minutes, its songs possess a renewed urgency and velocity. But his writing is more literary and exploratory still. Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (named after three of Toni Morrison’s most celebrated works) provides an embarrassment of imagistic riches: a king “ripping gold flickering flesh / Off his finger pads”; a sign in a bodega reads “‘What does your life entail?’ / Damn.” Dixon pays tribute to his hero Morrison – who he describes as “the greatest rapper of all time” – with this linguistic curiosity, uttered in his warm, often reedy, voice.

Dixon is also clearly working to squish For My Mama’s sprawl into more traditional structures. This impulse yields a handful of fleet, invigorating pop songs, including two highlights that create a neat mirror image: the warm, flute-filled Run, Run, Run, a paean to survival and friendship; and Tyler Forever, a booming trap song that pays tribute to a late friend. On the latter, he repeats the phrase “Tyler forever”, before interjecting: “Nah, this chorus ain’t clever” – the point instead, he raps, is to make people remember. Dixon clearly loves florid language, but his genius lies in knowing when less is more.