There’s places that don’t allow a creative person of color to grow and bloom Annapolis is one of those places that then tries to stomp it out.” “It’s a beautiful place, but it seems like settlers went there just to have their own place on the water and not let any others in. “I really never had friends in Annapolis because of just the complexities of race and class and things like that,” he says. In New York, he says, he “knew everyone” in his community, but he felt like more of a pariah in Annapolis, where he would try to relate to classmates through their shared interest in rock bands and often get rebuffed. He spent his school years in Annapolis, but his summers in Queens, where he says his grandmother was “the matriarch” of their Cambria Heights neighborhood. “There’s so much in all of these books that I feel like, because she’s a Black woman, we still are getting to, and I still am getting to myself.”ĭixon grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, where his Bronx-born mother opted to raise him and his sister. It’s beautiful,’” Dixon, 27, raves over Zoom from his home in Chicago. It’s so scary, but it’s not scary at all. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, Beloved? What even is this? She’s writing. His first exposure to Morrison came from his mother’s book collection. He titled his new album - Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?, due June 2 on City Slang Records - as a direct homage to three novels by Morrison, whom he calls “the greatest rapper of all time.” Artists might champion books of advice on ascending through capitalism, but we too rarely reference probing, disruptive writers like the great Toni Morrison, who asked questions of us that we’re too afraid to face. Far too often, the rap community doesn’t embrace the full scope of literature the way we should.
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