It’s a foregone conclusion that McKinley Dixon‘s work will be a beacon of light no matter when or probably how it’s released. For just the two albums so far that I’ve been paying unbroken attention to him, he’s proven to be a much needed force within hip-hop, one of unyielding positivity and poetics, but still nuanced and grown enough to explore trauma, loss, and love of all kinds, not to mention his technical prowess and masterful production choices. Buoyed by a bevy of influences and things on his mind, 2025 yields Magic, Alive!, a fiercely shining lighthouse in the darkened seas occupied by sirens and hull-bursting rocks.
Perhaps I’ve already summarized Dixon as an artist as well as I could with my review of Beloved? Paradise? Jazz!?, and perhaps that’s part of why I struggled to even start writing this one. What the hell is to be said? Magic, Alive! is a challenge for something like this, but it’s easy to ride with which is what ultimately makes it so worth at least trying to write about it. You – yes, you – need to know about it. Let’s make a deal – you read this review (more of a reaction than anything else), then go listen to the album yourself regardless of what my words did for you. Deal? Good, shake my hand. 🤝
First, an admission: I think I do like For My Mama And Anyone Who Look Like Her and Beloved? Paradise? Jazz!? more immediately than I do this album, but this album also seems deeper than those, unable to be fully parsed out in a couple weeks and healthy handful of listens. Is it still immediately likeable? Of course. Dixon is still rapping his ass off with prose that speaks to communal sensibilities and out of love, the production is serene, and the total package feels realized, tinged with magic and more heart than most artists would know what to do with.
Magic, Alive! is perilously wholesome, a story of friendship between four kids broken when one of them dies and the remaining three seek ways to return him to life or at least call forth to him in order to keep him in the fold. It’s the kind of stuff you think about as a kid – you lose someone and start asking questions like ‘where did they go?’, ‘why did they go?’, ‘why can’t we go see them?’. It’s all brought to a hopeful, whimsical apex that’s backdropped by the harsh realities of life that certainly had a hand in the kid’s death to begin with and made the phrase ‘the dead are better off than the living’ so popular.
“Listen Gentle” shows the cleanest throughline from a thematic influence to its place in the album. Dixon was influenced by finding a copy of Grant’s Annual of Magic in a bookstore, a book by U.F. Grant divulging the secrets of various tricks and sleight-of-hand illusions in an effort to make them real and tangible, not so much to spoil the fun. The chorus takes the same instructional procedure to share the majesty of the story’s particular brand of mana – ‘He said baby boy just come here, never fear/Lemme pull a quarter from behind yo’ ear/If I show you how to do it and you get the magic right/You can use these tricks to help ya ass take flight.‘ Magic is to be shared and interpreted, and from Dixon’s viewpoint, it takes many forms.
“Run, Run, Run Part II” and other songs mythologize the simple things we take for granted like making it back home after an eventful day or even just going outside to begin with, like with “We’re Outside, Rejoice!”. That’s actually one of the best, most triumphant songs on the album, a communal track about what isn’t home, filled with spectral, heady lines in the chorus like, ‘Stars and concrete used to map out my dreams/I could use blasphemy to do miraculous deeds‘. I think my favorite part – aside from the lengthy and beautiful instrumental intro caked in saxophone and groovy keys – is this wanderlusting section in the song’s only verse:
‘The view wasn’t giving me enough ammunition
Had to get out, might just break the seams
Hold it against me, it’s summer time, everyone schemes
From the legends to the dope man, the poets and fiends
Hoping what I brought back is enough to redeem’
It reminds of time I spent outside drinking from hoses, getting into trouble with my pals, risking sunburn on my very white-passing skin, and waiting for my mom to whistle loudly right before dusk blankets us to come home… or else. Something else McKinley Dixon thought of on “All The Loved Ones (What Would We Do???)”, the well-intentioned and sometimes militant love of a mother, dreaming of the best for us, wishing we gain the wisdom to see that ‘best for us’ for what it is sooner rather than later, even if it takes a couple ass-beatings. It’s a song about being a bad-ass little kid, creating decoys of you laying in your bed with basketballs on your pillow under a blanket while you’re out, but also contending with death (literal and perhaps figurative) that lurks around some corners with brutal lines (‘OG ask what she did for the punishment of me not coming home/Well, I ain’t been the same since they shot baby boy up in his dome/And grandma, you ain’t been the same since his father followed him home‘).
Honestly, I can’t help but think of my recent playthrough of my newest favorite game of all time, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In it, there’s a character named Esquie, a being filled with so much childlike wonder, whimsy, and… magic. Despite being that world’s equivalent of an all-powerful godlike creature capable of shapeshifting and massive strength, his existence is gentle and anchoring, providing not only a soft spot (again, literal and figurative) and often humorous break in an otherwise emotionally devastating and dark story about grief and loss. Every single time he was on screen, I smiled, even if seconds earlier I was crying, an unassailable light to set your eyes to without worry of being blinded. With Magic, Alive!, McKinley Dixon seeks to achieve the same for our own world in his own way, for his own community.
For the rest of y’all, Magic, Alive! feels like a Disney movie. Like, a good coming-of-age one from the ’90s or so, the kind you still quote to your like-minded and -aged friends while out at lunch together laughing and being charged by the sun in your face like a solar phone battery. It taught you lessons, you think back to its characters and which ones you identified with most, which moments made you cry, and how it still comforts you on dark days. Maybe you own three different copies from throughout the years. It’s also particularly salient when our social media feeds are usurped by soulless AI and hateful memes looking to bait out a visceral reaction to make a buck. Here’s actual creative magic, in more ways than one; a boy holding light in his hands filling him with elation and wonder just like on “Watch My Hands”, giving us a glimpse at its rays in hopes that we too are comforted by its warming potential. This isn’t the time to cut the strings on a child’s dreams – we need to attach some to ourselves and remember what it was like to soar high into the clouds.
Artist photo by Dennis Larance
