An electrifying collection of essays from legendary cultural critic and Pulitzer Prize-winner Greg Tate

‘Easily one of the greatest wordsmiths … [and] the best American writer and thinker of the past forty years’ Washington Post

From one of the most original, creative, and provocative writers on American culture comes a now-classic collection of essays, delving ‘far and wide into Black music, into film, into the beats and rhyme of culture’ (Questlove).

These pieces orbit social, pop cultural, political, and economic subjects­— from the rise of hip-hop, the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the music of Miles Davis, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bad Brains, and many others, to the crisis of the Black intellectual and the irony of the GOP recruiting Black Americans. With unrivalled flair, Tate writes in a voice that is at once angry, joyous, self-critiquing, and dazzlingly witty.

Tate teaches us ‘it is not too late to say too much, to be so dissatisfied with the world as it is that we throw far too many words toward the sky, and see what the heavens throw back’ (Hanif Abdurraqib).

"One of the most captivating and original collections of arts criticism ever written." - Orion

"Truly seminal" - Jazzwise

"Required reading for music criticism fans." - Chicago Reader

"One of the godfathers of hip-hop journalism." - The Source

"A singular voice, a fount of bravura essays on the fantastical creativity, determined resilience and wry paradoxes of Black creativity and life ... he affected every writer I cared about and learned from — we’re all Tate’s children" - The New York Times

"Restores a blueprint for criticism in the 21st century. The cultural gravity of this book makes it an essential part of any library on Black aesthetics, music criticism, and art criticism." - Library Journal

"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 . . . Flyboy is a handbook for preserving your own wild sanity under the terrordome. You should pilfer it from your best friend’s bookshelf posthaste." - Bookforum

"Hits hard with the truth, again and again." - 4Columns