Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?
by McKinley Dixon

Album Rating: 79.22
(713/9)

02.06.2023

McKinley Dixon (USA): Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?

1.Hanif Reads Toni (Feat. Hanif) 88
2.Sun, I Rise (Feat. Angelica Garcia) 83
3.Mezzanine Tippin' (Feat. Teller Bank$ & Alfred.) 70
4.Run, Run, Run 83
5.Live! From The Kitchen Table (Feat. Ghais Guevara) 75
6.Tyler, Forever 74
7.Dedicated To Tar Feather (Feat. Anjimile) 78
8.The Story So Far (Interlude) n/a
9.The Story So Far (Feat. Seline Haze) 78
10.Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (Feat. Ms. Jaylin Brown) 84

Yeah, this is dope.

From Arthurknight 07/22/2023 17:09 | #298275

In an out of nowhere splash Mckinley Dixon raps about home, urban life, contesting memories of childhood, lost friends and living communities.

More specifically, the whole album is a Toni Morrison reference. The title invokes the 'Beloved trilogy' of Morrison historical fiction novels Jazz, Beloved and Paradise. If you haven't, read them, and not just because they will illuminate Dixon's work. Morrison's writing is the quintessential prose of contemporary America and its tangled traumatic history.

Though Dixon speaks of history, of how we are shaped by it and cannot place finality on its tectonic movements (that we could have such hubris to say history is past us), he is principally focused with themes of development and artistic solitude – the history here is a personal one where Dixon reflects on the memories in the lead-up to success. The opening track Hanif Reads Toni follows word for word an excerpt from Jazz and I think it is relevant in light of his many references to the city to continue on that reading a couple paragraphs forward in the chapter:

"Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do... All you have to do is heed the design--the way it's laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow."

Perhaps the one thing that remains cloudy to me in this work is what Dixon's reading of Morrison is. He is certainly interested in how she represented the black urban experience in Jazz, however what else beyond that remains unclear. In some sense, there's a missed opportunity to interrogate the lasting and rather subtle implications of the trilogy's projection of Dante's Divine Comedy onto modern American racism. Morrison's writing is fundamentally about the unregulated system of sin and consequence which is inflicted with indifference onto African-American people, especially black women. Moreover, the revisionist historicity of Morrison's trilogy works to insert black women into a history where they are otherwise absent. Dixon offers little in the way of any direct inspection of these themes.

Dixon has definitely read Jazz though. In Dedicated to Tar Feather (the 'tar feather' here likely more a reference to torture tactics rather than Morrison's Tar Baby) he invokes the character Joe Trace's line "Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind." However, Dixon rejects the idea, using it to represent the loneliness of being an artist. The irony here, perhaps lost in the lyric, is that Trace himself is a fundamentally alone person. His mother left him without a 'trace' and his love expressed above is unrequited.

Maybe this is an over-reading of the album but I think Dixon is mostly adopting Morrison aesthetically. As Dante brought poetry to Summa Theologica, Dixon brings music to Morrison... Jazz!?