McKinley Dixon — artist
Beloved. Jazz. Paradise. It’s the Holy Trinity that encapsulated the late Toni Morrison’s three-book series. The works were a combination of raw emotions and social commentary, so powerful that musician McKinley Dixon marked those three words as the definitive transformative moment in his career. The result is Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (City Slang Records), an album that not only pours from every emotion that flows through Dixon, but touches on multiple genres as he details the Black experience in a brutally(and beautifully) honest way. Born in Annapolis, Maryland, McKinley spent the greater part of his youth traveling back and forth from the DMV to Jamaica, Queens. “My formative years were spent in Annapolis, but most of the moments that have inspired me, came from Queens,” he explains. Dixon felt a kinship to the New York City borough, mainly in the way that the neighborhood kids looked like he did; the same couldn’t be said in Maryland. “It gave me kind of this sense of longing that really jumpstarted my thinking about escapism through music.”Raised in a household led by his mother who worked a double-shift job, he found himself rising at 5:30every morning at the behest of his mother. “She really taught me a sense of discipline and how if you want something for yourself, you have to go get it.” Musically, his household was only filled by “artists whose first name was Mary,” including the Queen ofHip-Hop Soul Mary J. Blige and Gospel duo Mary Mary. Discovering Outkast became serendipitous forDixon, as he gravitated towards Hip-Hop while also being drawn to the theatrical Rock of groups like MyChemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco through his friends in Maryland. “Those groups also helped me with my sense of longing, since their music reflected a sense of longing,” he recounts.