Don’t Call It a Comeback

Great, great piece on Michael Jackson by Greg Tate in Sunday’s Newsweek. Tate has always been outside the box in his criticism—it’s the reason he’s never had the visibility of Nelson George. These days though, it’s like he’s goin’ through a renaissance, harking back to the pieces he did for the Voice in the late 1980s and 1990s, most of which was collected in Flyboy in the Buttermilk. A lot of the younger cats didn’t have the chance to read Tate during those days, so it’s great that he’s still putting it down in major way. Check the flow:

what if Jackson's alleged pursuit of forbidden man-boy love, and even his artificially induced albinism, were not simply pedophilia and African-American self-loathing? What if all of this has really been Jackson's form of black rage turned inside out for the world to see - his way of showing white America the monster he thought a black man had to become to share in their American dream? After all, how was Jackson supposed to predict gangsta rap and the revelation of its rewarding racial paradox: that there was as much love and money in the heartland for a prancing, predatory-acting black man who pretended to be armed to the teeth as there was for one who pretended to be defanged?

Damn.

***

Charlie Braxton, who is one of my favorite journalists, has a funny, but ultimately very sad piece on Flava Flav and VH-1’s Strange Love. For those of you who don’t know Charlie’s work (shame on you, btw), check out the liner notes to The Best of Pete Rock and CL Smooth—worthy of a Grammy nomination in my mind.

***

I’ve been loving NPR’s Fresh Air, simply because the host Terry Gross
has opened the door wide open for the kinds of folk who come through: Ice Cube, RZA, Don Byron, to name a few. Yesterday Gross spent some time with Hank Jones—pianist and brother of Thad and Elvin. He’s 86 and like my hero John Hope Franklin, I hope I have that kind of energy and fire when I’m that age.