McKinley Dixon

The Richmond-born, Chicago-based rapper McKinley Dixon announces his new album, Magic, Alive!, out June 6th  via City Slang, and presents its lead single/visual, “Sugar Water” (ft. Quelle Chris & Anjimile). For the better part of a decade, Dixon has been 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. 

In many ways, the breathless and ebullient 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. Indeed, the crux of Magic, Alive! 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—says yes to all of it. 

Magic, Alive!’s lead single, “Sugar Water,” which features the producer, rapper and songwriter Quelle Chris alongside indie-folk artist Anjimile, tells the story at the heart of Magic, Alive!. In Dixon’s words, “‘Sugar Water’ is a discussion on how to make fleeting moments last forever, and how to carry those not here with you through time and space. It raises the question ‘what’s the price to pay for an eternal life lived through others memories?’” He raps : “I guess if it don’t kill you, make you harder /Bring him back just for my heart?/ Shit, it seem an easy barter.” 

Magic, Alive! began life when Dixon received an unexpected email from English producer 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 Sam 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.

At the spiritual and social core of Magic, Alive! is when tragedy starts to sublimate into hope. 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.