Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (studio album) by McKinley Dixon
Condition: New
Condition: New
McKinley Dixon bestography
Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? is ranked as the best album by McKinley Dixon.
Upcoming concerts
Listen to Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? on YouTube
Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? track list
The tracks on this album have an average rating of 77 out of 100 (all tracks have been rated).
Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? rankings
Latest 20 charts that this album appears in:
You can include this album in your own chart from the My Charts page!
Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? collection
Showing all 7 members who have this album in their collection
Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? ratings
where:
av = trimmed mean average rating an item has currently received.
n = number of ratings an item has currently received.
m = minimum number of ratings required for an item to appear in a 'top-rated' chart (currently 10).
AV = the site mean average rating.
Showing latest 5 ratings for this album. | Show all 64 ratings for this album.
Rating | Date updated | Member | Album ratings | Avg. album rating |
---|---|---|---|---|
04/06/2024 16:35 | MagicSix | 140 | 57/100 | |
03/03/2024 15:58 | Rayzer6 | 1,361 | 86/100 | |
02/23/2024 16:12 | Keatownrodriguez | 1,308 | 68/100 | |
02/01/2024 19:49 | angryandy | 1,939 | 71/100 | |
01/13/2024 07:55 | flamingyesdept | 2,831 | 77/100 |
Rating metrics:
Outliers can be removed when calculating a mean average to dampen the effects of ratings outside the normal distribution. This figure is provided as the trimmed mean. A high standard deviation can be legitimate, but can sometimes indicate 'gaming' is occurring. Consider a simplified example* of an item receiving ratings of 100, 50, & 0. The mean average rating would be 50. However, ratings of 55, 50 & 45 could also result in the same average. The second average might be more trusted because there is more consensus around a particular rating (a lower deviation).
(*In practice, some albums can have several thousand ratings)
This album is rated in the top 7% of all albums on BestEverAlbums.com. This album has a Bayesian average rating of 75.5/100, a mean average of 75.2/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 76.0/100. The standard deviation for this album is 12.2.
Please log in or register if you want to be able to leave a rating
Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? favourites
Showing all 4 members who have added this album as a favourite
Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? comments
Showing all 3 comments |
Most Helpful First | Newest First | Maximum Rated First |
Longest Comments First
(Only showing comments with -2 votes or higher. You can alter this threshold from your profile page. Manage Profile)
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.
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!?
Please log in or register if you want to be able to add a comment
Your feedback for Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?
A lot of hard work happens in the background to keep BEA running, and it's especially difficult to do this when we can't pay our hosting fees :(
We work very hard to ensure our site is as fast (and FREE!) as possible, and we respect your privacy.