Flyboy 2

Greg Tate

Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America.

Introduction: Lust, of All Things (Black)  1 1. The Black Male Show Amiri Baraka  9 Wayne Shorter  16 Jimi Hendrix  24 John Coltrane  41 Gone Fishing: Remembering Lester Bowie  44 The Black Artists' Group  50 Butch Morris  55 Charles Edward Anderson Berry and the History of Our Future  57 Lonnie Holley  68 Marion Brown (1931–2010) and Djinji Brown  71 Dark Angels of Dust: David Hammons and the Art of Streetwise Trancendentalism  73 Bill T. Jones: Combative Moves  78 Garry Simmons: Conceptual Bomber  81 The Persistence of Vision: Storyboard P  83 Ice Cube  91 Wynton Marsalis: Jazz Crusader  102 Thonton Dail: Free, Black, and Brightening Up the Darkness of the World  110 Kehinde Wiley  124 Rammellzee: The Ikonoklast Samurai  127 Richard Pryor: Pryor Lives  136 Richard Pryor  146 Gil Scott-Heron  149 The Man in Our Mirror: Michael Jackson  152 Miles Davis  158 2. She Laughing Mean and Impressive Too Born to Dyke: I Love My Sister Laughing and Then Again When She's Looking Mean, Queer, and Impressive  167 Joni Mitchell: Black and Blond  175 Azealia Banks  177 Sade: Black Magic Woman  180 All the Things You Could Be by Now If Iames Brown Was a Feminist  186 Itabari Njeri  193 Kara Walker  196 Women at the Edge of Space, Time, and Art: Ruminations on Candida Romero's Little Girls  202 Ellen Gallagher  208 To Bid a Poet Black and Abstract  210 "The Gikuyu Mythos versus the Cullud Grrrl from Outta Space": A Wangechi Mutu Feature  213 Come Join the Hieroglyphic Zombie Parade: Deborah Grant  219 Björk's Second Act  223 Thelma Golden  228 3. Hello Darknuss My Old Meme Top Ten Reasons Why So Few Black Women Were Down to Occupy Wall Street Plus Four More  235 What Is Hip-Hop?  239 Intelligence Data: Bob Dylan  242 Hip-Hop Turns Thirty  246 Love and Crunk: Outkast  252 White Freedom: Eminem  254 Wu-Dunit: Wu-Tang Clan  256 Unlocking the Truth vs. John Cage  260 4. Screenings Spike Lee's Bamboozled  265 It's A Mack Thing  270 Sex and Negrocity: John Singleton's Baby Boy  272 Lincoln in Whiteface: Jeffrey Wright and Don Cheadle in Susan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog  275The Black Power Mixtape  278 5. Race, Sex, Politricks and Belle Lettres Clarence Major  285 The Atlantic Sound: Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound  288 Acocalypse Now: Patricia Hill Collins's Black Sexual Politics; Thomas Shevory's Notorious H.I.V.; Jacob Levenson's The Secret Epidemic  290 Blood and Bridges  292 Nigger-'Tude  296 Triple Threat: Jerry Gafio Watts's Amiri Baraka; Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright; David Macey's Frantz Fanon  299 Bottom Feeders: Natsuo Kirino's Out  306 Scaling the Heights: Maryse Condé's Windward Heights  307 Fear of a Mongrel Planet: Zadie Smith's White Teeth  310 Adventures in the Skin Trade: Lisa Teasley's Glow in the Dark  313 Generous Hexed: Jeffery Renard Allen's Rails under My Back  315 Going Underground: Gayl Jones's Mosquito  317 Judgment Day: Toni Morrison's Love and Edward P. Jones's The Known World  320 Black Modernity and Laughter, or How It Came to Be That N*g*as Got Jokes  322 Kalahari Hopscotch, or Notes toward a Twenty-Volume Afrocentric Futurist Manifesto  330 Sources  343 Index  347