McKinley Dixon

In September 2024, McKinley Dixon was browsing a small Portland bookstore when he stumbled upon a benevolent omen: a thumb-worn but intact copy of Grant’s Annual of Magic, a compendium of card tricks, spells, and ruses printed nearly a century earlier by U.F. Grant. It had been made not far from Dixon’s new spot in Chicago, and it represented an early attempt to demystify magic, to turn sleight of hand into something you could actually see and take with you. (That Grant descended from a popular American president didn’t, of course, hurt.) The mission spoke to Dixon, who had just finished a breathless and ebullient new album where he tried to do much the same—drag magic into hip-hop, to give the genre’s on-the-ground reportage a new sense of the mystical and the possible. It is the power source for Dixon’s most imaginative record yet, the irrepressible Magic, Alive!

Also featuring South Side Chicago hip-hop artist GR3G!