Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. - book reviews

Black Enterprise, Dec, 1992 by Tonya Bolden

Greg Tate, staff writer for The Village Voice, writes with a laser. And his mixture of straight-up English, street-speak and scholarese can be quite dizzying. But the spin makes you think. And in Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, Tate serves up 40 fresh, sharp essays.

The writings (from 1981 to 1991) are on music, the visual arts, literature and politics, and are as astute as their titles are provocative: "Growing Up in Public: Amiri Baraka Changes His Mind," "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke," "Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk."

Even if you're not interested in a particular subject, you'll keep reading. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. says in the book's foreword, there are enough cheerleaders and hanging judges. However, Tate represents "a much more rare combination of caring critique." One is a 1988 review of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Tate says: "To know PE is to love the agitprop (and artful noise) and to worry over the whack retarded philosophy they espouse." Citing examples of the group's "idiot blather," he writes that since they "show sound reasoning when they focus on racism as a tool of the U.S. power structure, they should be intelligent enough to realize that dehumanizing gays, women and Jews isn't going to set black people free."

Tate's tough love is apparent. In "Love and the Enemy," he exhorts black leadership (and we, the people, too) to outgrow reactive rage. He points out that "when it takes police or mob violence to galvanize us into reaction, it means that there is an acceptable level of suffering and misery."

Flyboy is about black self-empowerment, and it is worthwhile reading. And since this point man on New Black Aesthetic just may have more than 15 minutes of fame, his book is a good way to see what he is up to, into and about.