"[Tate''s] language - cribbed from literature, academia, popular culture and hip-hop - was as influential as the content of his ideas. His aesthetic, innovations and intellectual originality, particularly in his pioneering hip-hop criticism, continue to influence subsequent generations, especially writers and critics of color." --Pulitzer Prize citation "I stole [my roommate''s copy] for a while till I got my own, which across the decades has become one of a handful of books I regularly pull off the shelf just to soak in a few paragraphs and juice the brain up into writing mode . With its re-humanizing sprezzatura that always unveils the power grid beneath the everyday as well as the personal stakes in the systemic, [ Flyboy in the Buttermilk ] is a handbook for preserving your own wild sanity under the terrordome. You should pilfer it from your best friend''s bookshelf posthaste." -Carl Wilson, Bookforum "A new reissue of Greg Tate''s 1992 essay collection hits hard with the truth, again and again . Tate hit as hard as the music he wrote about, and his columns were often more important than his topics . the beauty of Tate, especially this bag of uncut gems, is that he was not a theorist of a unified field or a strict logician--or even an underdog .

Maybe the most distinct pleasure available here is the palpable truth that Tate was not auditioning for another job . [he] didn''t engage with culture with that sort of rueful magazine approach, the clucks-over-the-sad-brutality-of-America-but-hey-what-an-album pellet so much writing is cubed into. Tate knew the brutality is there every time the one comes back around. He just wanted everyone to get up." -Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns "This new edition of Tate''s essay collection . reminds readers how wonderful it is to have this long-out-of-print book available again, as it is one of the first and most influential books that helped to define a modern Black aesthetic . More than just a time capsule, the book acts as a primer for being a critic. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Miles Davis, Samuel R.

Delany, Public Enemy, De La Soul, Spike Lee, and Amiri Baraka are all discussed here, seen through Tate''s clear, critical eye . [T]his reissue restores a blueprint for criticism in the 21st century. VERDICT: The cultural gravity of this book makes it an essential part of any library on Black aesthetics, music criticism, and art criticism." -John Rodzvilla , Library Journal "A singular voice, a fount of bravura essays on the fantastical creativity, determined resilience and wry paradoxes of Black creativity and life . His writing froze and shattered time, supercharged neurons, unraveled familiar knots and tied up beautiful new ones . he affected every writer I cared about and learned from -- we''re all Tate''s children." --Jon Caramanica, The New York Times "[It''s] hard to explain the impact that Flyboy in the Buttermilk had on a whole generation of young writers and critics who read every page of it like scripture. It''s still a clinic on literary brilliance" --Jelani Cobb, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Three Or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025 "[Tate''s] best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon; they were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn''t have got along but did .

What made Tate''s criticism special was his ability to theorize outward from his encounters with genius and his brushes with banality--to telescope between moments of artistic inspiration and the giant structures within which those moments were produced." --Hua Hsu, The New Yorker "A writer who''d not only mastered the mode of writing to which I aspired, but had reinvented it, right down to the vocabulary, so that music criticism became music itself." --Ann Powers, NPR "To call Greg Tate one of the most important critics and essayists of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in any language, would not be an exaggeration. In fact, it would not be enough." --Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review "He looked knowingly to our tears and offered us a salve in the massive wonder of epic sentences that captured the full scale of both our sorrow and the undying enchantment that lives on in the music." --Daphne A.

Brooks, Bookforum "Tate taught many of us how to write and even to think--musically, improvisationally, poetically . Tate''s cultural criticism has long served as a North Star for those championing artistic freedom, cultural complexity and Black excellence." --Kevin Young, Director of the Smithsonian''s National Museum of African American History and Culture.