Dijon Is Daddy

When I interviewed Dijon Duenas around the release of his audaciously raw debut album, 2021’s Absolutely, I was struck by his mix of cutting self-deprecation and astronomical ambition. He was suspicious of his own viral success—the second song he ever wrote, a lovestruck toe-tapper called “Skin,” was randomly funneled onto indie playlists and collected tens of millions of streams—and didn’t feel like he had yet put in the work required to be legitimately great. At the same time, he clearly had an intense drive to be legitimately great. He spoke about hopes and goals that most up-and-coming artists would be too timid to think, let alone say to a journalist. He wanted to help artists as big as Beyoncé adopt the seat-of-the-pants production style he and his friends (including a then-little-known guitarist named Michael Gordon, aka Mk.gee) put to such brilliant use on Absolutely. He looked forward to creating a new pop paradigm, citing his hero Prince as well as game-changing records like Radiohead’s Kid A and D’Angelo’s Voodoo. “You gotta go ass-out,” he told me. “That’s why I’m so hard on myself, because I know I have to dig in. I know where I’m at and I know where I think it could be. I always tell people, ‘Give me five years, I guarantee it will be batshit.’”

Almost four years after that conversation, Dijon is making good on his promise. Absolutely’s impact stretched wide and deep, calibrating ears for Mk.gee’s radical 2024 breakthrough, Two Star & the Dream Police. Earlier this year, Dijon collaborated with one of his idols—and a lodestar for those looking to crack through to the mainstream while keeping their cred, and soul, intact—Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Though he hasn’t worked with Beyoncé (yet), his name was all over the credits for Justin Bieber’s most stripped-down, no-bullshit album to date, last month’s Swag. So yes, Dijon is really doing it, shifting the sound of pop at its highest levels. He continues that pursuit with maniacal fervor on his second album, Baby.

This is music for falling in love, for holding onto it, for fucking, for modern masculinity, for fatherhood, for questioning the reason you were put on this Earth in the first place. It’s the raucous spirit of Ol’ Dirty Bastard transmitted through Jodeci and Bruce Springsteen. It’s a seance for Prince where Jai Paul and Old Kanye spell out “YAMAHA” on the Ouija board. To borrow a word, it is batshit—in the most glorious possible way.

At times, the album sounds like what would happen if Dijon took every instrument he had—keyboards, drum machines, guitars—and threw them down a long flight of stairs… and then sampled that cacophony, giving it enough structure to make sense without sacrificing its headlong abandon… and then recorded himself singing while tumbling down that same staircase, high off the free fall. There are plenty of deconstructed grooves dotted with little surprises that tilt things delightfully off balance. Like a quick burst of a classic hip-hop song. A zap of radio static. A blown-out ad lib. A dog bark. If Absolutely came off like a group of friends jamming out and shooting shit, Baby is more akin to a guy cutting open his own head and putting the freakiest ideas that pop out to tape.

Ironically, the main inspirations for this feral album are as traditional as they come: In the years since Absolutely, Dijon got married and had his first child, a son named Baby. (Yes, his actual name is Baby.) Throughout pop history, such newfound stability can often result in music that’s safe and staid—John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” comes to mind—as if the parent is trying to protect their child from the outside world by way of soothing lullabies. And for all its unruliness, Baby can be sweet. The opening title track has Dijon singing directly to his son over a stringy guitar riff descended from Prince, telling him how his parents met, even bringing him—and us—into the delivery room. But the song is also honest in a way you don’t often hear in music by new dads. 

Recalling his thought process as he and his wife considered having a kid, the 33-year-old sings, “I said, ‘Well I’m half a man—and darling I can’t, or maybe I can?’/How can you know, Baby.” And there are unusual musical touches that puncture this origin story, like the atonal synths fluttering in the background as Dijon recalls exchanging trepidatious looks with his wife in the hospital. Or the warped outro, where he turns the song inside-out amid the chopped-up wails of an infant and disorienting drum breaks that hint at an exciting, and uncertain, future. As the child of a broken home who was shuttled back and forth between his mom and dad, Dijon knows full well how the responsibilities of adulthood can take their toll, and how the fallout can be passed down. Instead of shying away from those realities on this album, he’s facing them head-on.

Perhaps more than anything, though, this is a horny album. That first track, “Baby!,” is immediately followed by one called “Another Baby!” where Dijon lusts after his wife like a Looney Tunes character with their tongue rolling out like a red carpet. “Let’s make a baby!” he yelps over combustible funk that once again recalls The Purple One. The song also includes samples and interpolations of decades-old rap songs by legends like DJ Quik, Snoop Dogg, and Suga Free, adding to its live-wire spontaneity.

All of those nods also got me thinking about the evolution of masculinity in music, and the thorniness of worshipping artists who have treated women terribly on record and sometimes in real life too. One of Prince’s girlfriends, Jill Jones, has said that the icon repeatedly punched her in the face one night in 1984. And after Prince and his first wife, Mayte Garcia, tragically lost their son in his infancy the following decade, Prince was cruelly cold to her and ultimately abandoned the marriage. DJ Quik served time for pistol-whipping his sister, he has said, after she allegedly threatened to extort him and kidnap his children. Suga Free pioneered a style of pimp-rap that’s as wildly misogynistic as it is entertaining. These artists are a part of Dijon’s musical database, and Baby could be read as both a testament to their artistic legacies and a reminder to keep one’s demons at bay.

Another song, “Higher!,” recalls the beatific triumph of Kanye West’s early albums, before his music, and pretty much everything else about him, turned weird and ugly and sad. (As a kid, Dijon was such a big fan that he skipped school to buy Kanye’s Late Registration.) That track is pretty horny, too, but there’s no grossness, no meanness. “I wanna say what gets you all turnt out!” he teases at one point, before playfully checking himself: “Is that too much?” There’s absolutely nothing preachy about Baby, but within its chaos is a feminist worldview that acknowledges the transgressions of previous generations and vows not to repeat them.

This concept is rendered starkly on “My Man,” which includes the album’s most fraught and affecting vocal performance. Like on the wrenching Absolutely highlight “Rodeo Clown,” Dijon sings from the point of view of a woman who’s been wrung dry by an unfeeling and unequipped man. But even though their love is a husk, she can’t leave him. “It didn’t shock me that you gave it up/And that you locked out all your love,” Dijon rasps, the words spraying out from the bottom of his being. Based on the way he sings this song, torn to shreds, it sounds like he knows of negligence, how it can creep and fester. Maybe that’s why he spends so much of this album professing his wide-open love for his family.

Baby’s world-upside-down cover photo was taken at Dijon’s wedding, and three of the record’s songs sound like they could immediately slot into any adventurous wedding DJ’s setlist. “Kindalove,” kind of a chillwave twist on an ’80s Springsteen ballad like “Valentine’s Day,” is prime first-dance material; “Yamaha,” a glittering disco ball of an R&B song, is for the slow dancers with hearts in their eyes; “Automatic” is the fun floor-filler that makes auntie show up and show out. These songs, and this record, express the hard-won joy that can come from finding that person, making another person, and then simply being those people, together. It’s wholesome but not corny. Lustful but not lascivious. Musically adventurous but not pretentious. It’s crazy, in love.