Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader

by 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 last thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan Lori Parks' 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.  

Genres: Music, Essays, Criticism, Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published August 5, 2016

About the author

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 2: The Greg Tate Reader, 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.

Reviews

[Michael Trigilio · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow - over and over again - dumbstruck by the deep abstraction, connective-tissue-generating, hilarious + profound wisdom found in Tate's broad reach as a journalist and poet and scholar and critic. I just can't recommend highly enough. I'm gonna get copies just to hand out as gifts. The Pryor duet of interview and obit is truly funny and truly wrenching if you love Pryor for giving us everything. Tate's deep-digging into Jimi's sound and James' profundity is worth the price of admission, if not a graduate seminar. Finally, the last entry in the book on Black Futurism (w sly side-eye to Dery) hit me like a poem so rich it deserves many a revisit. This book is really great.

[Charlie Lincoln · Rating 5 out of 5]

The hardest swinging prose I’ve ever read

[Butch Lazorchak · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had seen some of his writing in the Village Voice but wanted to go deeper after getting into his band Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber. I picked this up before he passed away, but his recent death made me want to read it more urgently.

I thought his authorly "pyrotechnics" might annoy me, but I actually liked them quite a bit. He had real insight into folks like Jimi Hendrix, the Wu Tang and Miles Davis that I didn't think were possible.

I got it mainly for the music writing and I wasn't as interested in the stuff on non-musical artists or socio-sexual digressions, but I still found parts of those pretty interesting when I dropped in.

[Angelica LeMinh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember seeing Greg Tate in a documentary recently (within the last two years), speaking as a musician, and though I don't think I had ever seen his face "live", I immediately thought to myself, "Greg Tate, Greg Tate? Huh." It was the billing as a musician that got me, however not untrue that is, I guess it's like calling Common an actor only, or even first.

As a writer who technically trained (and was traumatized by) in music first, who has mostly written about music so it's not like I've ever really let it go, I am moved in more ways than one. Reading this retrospective (of sorts) collection of essays, I am wondering about the trajectory of inspiration. I am seeing a lot of parallels, but wonder if that's retrospect, or if I was influenced all along. It's kind of hard to separate these things, with hip hop as our common medium, and our common media.

What I know for sure is that Greg Tate is an amazing writer. I am also seeing that incorporating slang does in fact date your work (and make it kinda corny), a fact that I was not willing to accept at the time that it was presented to me by a French Canadian editor, so many years ago now. It doesn't surprise me that jazz is where he landed, because jazz is all he's been doing. (I on the other hand, have been using my improvisation skills as of late to figure out samples and leitmotifs, then playing them along with the classic videos of my time-eg. the "Liberian Girl" sample in Xscape's "Keep On', Keepin' On"-Jermaine Dupri and MC Lyte are true treasures that I could watch years of "Behind the Musics" about, by the by).

"In conclusion I'd like to offer a pair of Black Zen paradoxes: My man A.J. once said that he thought Andy Warhol was so white that he was Black. Maybe James Brown was so masculine that only the hardest working women in showbiz are truly capable of carrying on in the name of his jockstrap." (192, All the Things You Could Be by Now if James Brown Was a Feminist)

"Once upon a time we thought hip-hop was the fire next time or at least the spark. Once upon a time we believed in the Easter Bunny too." (256, Wu-Dunnit: Wu-Tang Clan)

"For one thing comedy is all about timing; for another thing great comedians not only say funny things but they say things funny." (323, Black Modernity and Laughter, or How it Came to Be that N*g*as Got Jokes)

"He brought the whole continuum of the trumpet lineage into the avant-garde, brought the whole trumpet baggage with him in a way that was obvious-pointing back without quoting." (48, Butch Morris)

SEE?!

Butch Morris wasn't the only artist that Tate hipped me to, he was just the first to appear. The others are David Hammons (NYC installation coming December 2020), Storyboard P, and Lisa Teasley. I love writing about art that not only makes me want to experience the art/ists, but also makes me feel as I will be going in with a solid primer.

[Sarah Paolantonio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was gonna go for Flyboy In The Buttermilk but saw this wide-ranging collection and went for it; from the too brief but not blurb-length biography of Jimi Hendrix to an interview with Ice Cube, remembrances of Gil Scott-Heron and Michael Jackson, pieces on Joni Mitchell, Dylan, and Azealia Banks, and blurbs on Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Spike Lee's Bamboozled. This collection is for every library, and for every student of criticism and music journalism. Tate was a principle authority in his voice, craft, and straightforward nature as an interviewer and writer.

I'm sorry I discovered him and the depth of his writing after his death. RIP to a legend.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greg Tate is one of my two biggest influences as a music critic (the other being Gary Giddins), and this book contains some fantastic essays, many of which I remember reading in the Village Voice and other outlets when they were new. This book, and its prequel Flyboy In The Buttermilk, are essential reading.

[Richard Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

deep thoughts and well written

I thoroughly enjoyed this book which tackles important black cultural issues from an informed multicultural perspective. And does so with elan, gusto and soul. Tate will be sorely missed for the depths of his knowledge, and the heights of his writing style. He was an elegant shooting star.

[Phil Overeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently my favorite music writer to binge-read. Style, intellect, range, wit, bravery, ability to balance fandom with critical acumen--you name it, the brother's got it.