Greg Tate

I have a love/hate relationship with The Village Voice. Too often, the rag is guilty of publishing some of the most impenetrable bullshit of all time in its arts pages, but occasionally they'll run something like Greg Tate's piece on the 30th anniversary of hiphop, wherein he bemoans the genre's decline from folk art to an excuse for conspicuous consumption. The former Gregory "Ironman" Tate's a writer whose interests are broad enough to encompass Henry Louis Gates, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and, um, hermeneutics as well as Miles Davis, George Clinton, and the Bad Brains. His book Flyboy in the Buttermilk is out of print but worth searching out.