**"**Greg Tate was my first, and in some ways truest, North Star . . . Greg was the first person who validated the art that I loved and made it intellectually viable." —Questlove, from the foreword"T****he velocity and volume of his exuberance, his demands, his curiosities, and, yes, his vibrant dissatisfactions pulled me to the edge of

White kids from the ’burbs are throwing up gang signs. The 2001 Grammy winner for best rap artist was as white as rice. And blond-haired sorority sisters are sporting FUBU gear. What is going on in American culture that’s giving our nation a racial-identity crisis?Following the trail blazed by Norman Mailer’s controversial essay “The White Negro,” Everything but the Burden brings together voices from music, popular culture, the literary world, and the media speaking about ...

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 analy...

A reissue of Greg Tate's classic, out-of-print collection of essays, with a new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new foreword by Questlove.From one of the most original, creative, and provocative culture critics comes an eye-opening collection of essays and tales about American music and culture.Under the guise of writing about a single subject, Greg Tate’s essays in Flyboy in the Buttermilk branch out from his usual and explore social, pop c...

At the age of nineteen, Nasir "Nas" Jones began recording tracks for his debut album -- and changed the music world forever. Released in 1994, Illmatic was hailed as an instant masterpiece and has proven one of the most influential albums in hip-hop history. With its close attention to beats and lyricism, and riveting first-person explorations of the isolation and desolation of urban poverty, Illmatic was pivotal in the evolution of the genre.In Born to Use Mi...

NPR Best Books of 2017In this sweeping history of popular music in the United States, NPR's acclaimed music critic examines how popular music shapes fundamental American ideas and beliefs, allowing us to communicate difficult emotions and truths about our most fraught social issues, most notably sex and race.In Good Booty, Ann Powers explores how popular music became America's primary erotic art form. Powers takes us from nineteenth-century New Orl...

Hip: The History is the story of how American pop culture has evolved throughout the twentieth century to its current position as world cultural touchstone. How did hip become such an obsession? From sex and music to fashion and commerce, John Leland tracks the arc of ideas as they move from subterranean Bohemia to Madison Avenue and back again. Hip: The History examines how hip has helped shape -- and continues to influence -- America's view of itself, and provides an in...

Required reading from great poets of our time. Drew Barrymore: “Upon Pondering Breasts.” Tom Cruise: “An Exegesis on Psychiatry.” Ann Coulter: “My Kind of Fun.” And Trump and Sheen and Snooki, John Boehner and Michelle Bachman, Miley and Ke$ha. Hugo Chavez. Even a Zen haiku by Emmitt Smith:I think it’s his self-confidence in himself thatmakes him confident.With their great gift for curating the inane public utterances of celebrities, politicians, and ...

David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's exuberant exploration of rap music and culture.Living together in Cambridge in 1989, David Foster Wallace and longtime friend Mark Costello discovered that they shared "an uncomfortable, somewhat furtive, and distinctively white enthusiasm for a certain music called rap/hip-hop."The book they wrote together, set against the legendary Boston music scene, mapped the bipolarities of rap and pop, rebellion and acceptance...

*Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism**A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Criticism and Essays Pick for Spring 2012*The Grey Album, the first work of prose by the brilliant poet Kevin Young, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeTaking its title from Danger Mouse's pioneering mashup of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' The White Album, Kevin Young's...

In It's Bigger Than Hip Hop, M. K. Asante, Jr. looks at the rise of a generation that sees beyond the smoke and mirrors of corporate-manufactured hip hop and is building a movement that will change not only the face of pop culture, but the world.Asante, a young firebrand poet, professor, filmmaker, and activist who represents this movement, uses hip hop as a springboard for a larger discussion about the urgent social and political issues affecting the post-hip-hop generatio...

In this penetrating collection of original essays, legendary gadfly and esteemed critic Stanley Crouch tackles the notion on authenticity-what it is, what it isn't, and what we make of it, for good or for bad. While the question of who's the real deal and who isn't has now seeped into nearly every corner of American culture, nowhere does the idea of authenticity hold greater sway than in the realm of ethnicity. In this bracing collection of original essays, Crouch brings all his rhetorical...