An electrifying collection of essays from legendary cultural critic and Pulitzer Prize-winner Greg Tate‘Easily one of the greatest wordsmiths … [and] the best American writer and thinker of the past forty years’ Washington PostFrom one of the most original, creative, and provocative writers on American culture comes a now-classic collection of essays, delving ‘far and wide into Black music, into film, into the beat...

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...

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 ...

**"**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

**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.This program is read by Dion Graham and Mikel Mwalimu-Banks with introductions written and read by Questlove, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. It also features prerecorded and new music by Tate, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, and Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber conducted by Vernon Reid.**From one of the most origin...

Whether along race, class or generational lines, hip-hop music has been a source of controversy since the beats got too big and the voices too loud for the block parties that spawned them. America has condemned and commended this music and the culture that inspires it. Dubbed "the Hip-Hop Intellectual" by critics and fans for his pioneering explorations of rap music in the academy and beyond, Michael Eric Dyson is uniquely situated to probe the most compelling and controversial dimensions ...

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...

Disco thumps back to life in this pulsating exploration of the culture and politics of the glitterball world.In the 1970s, as the disco tsunami engulfed America, the once-innocent question, “Do you wanna dance?” became divisive, even explosive. What was it about this much-maligned music that made it such hot stuff? In this incisive history, Alice Echols captures the felt experience of the Disco Years—on dance floors both fabulous and tacky, at the movies, in the st...

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...

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...

All About Love author bell hooks and other innovative Black thinkers explore ‘coolness’ within Black culture, in this 10th anniversary edition of Rebecca Walker’s visonary essay collection.“[This] slim anthology gives itself a formidable task: pinning down the elusive definitions of ‘Black Cool,’ an aesthetic and a philosophy that echoes across the African diaspora.” —The AtlanticOriginally published in 2012, this collecti...

Female spoken word artists have become the spokeswomen for a new generation. This demanding oral poetry of the early 21st century has defined a vanguard of lithely muscled voices, women who think and act decisively to create their distinctive and desperately earned realities.The combination of the eminent slam movement and the upsurge of bold underground feminism has created a unique pool of women who verbally challenge society on all fronts. Editor Alix Olson (internationally tour...