Flyboy 2

Greg Tate is a music and popular culture critic and journalist whose work has appeared in many publications, including the Village Voice, Vibe, Spin, the Wire, and Downbeat. He is the author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience and the editor of Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. Tate, via guitar and baton, also leads the conducted improvisation ensemble Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, who tour internationally.

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  275
The 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