Tate begins with recollections of reading Stanley Crouch in the Voice in the late-70s, telling him out in the hinterland what was happening in the metropolis. That hit me, because a teenage me, living out in the hinterlands, was somehow inspired to get a subscription to the Voice. And the writers I most remember reading were Greg Tate and Nelson George.
It was through the Voice that I read about hip hop, Public Enemy, Spike Lee--the zeitgeist of the mid- to late-80s. It was because of reading the Voice that I saw "Do the Right Thing" on the big screen at Har Mar Mall that hot summer that it came out, that I bought copies of "It Takes a Nation..." and "Fear of a Black Planet" on cassette tape. (I even bought the 12" of "Fight the Power", which I've got to dig up.) I read about De La (I remember taking to school the 1989 Pazz & Jop issue in which "3 Feet High" came in #1) and Tribe
(they gave "People's Instinctive Travels" a mediocre review--I wonder if it was Christgau?). I saved those couple years worth of Voice issues at my parents' place for quite a few years afterwards, every once in a while revisiting the music reviews, Tate's and George's essays.
At the time I even had pipe dreams of moving to NYC and working in alt-journalism. But I am no Greg Tate. I chose the UofC over Columbia, math over writing. I still haven't made it to NYC, though lately the idea has been rekindled.
Speaking of Greg Tate, I've been saving one of those weekly Voice e-mails since January, with the intention of posting the link to another essay of his. I got the impression that this one created a stir in that subset of the hip hop world that thinks and writes about
the culture:
Hip-hop Turns 30: Whatcha Celebratin' For?
Rethinking the populist art form, this "marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism"
By Greg Tate
That's relief--I can finally delete that e-mail.
But seriously, read the piece when you get a chance. No one write like Tate. How about this:
Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture--literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.
Or this:
The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.
I'll leave it to you to read the incendiary last half of the piece.
Speaking of the Voice and alt-weeklies in general, this screed by Jeff Chang ended up in my inbox as well. I haven't read it, but thought I'd post the link: "Eulogy For The Alt-Weekly"
I still got to do that August Wilson post...
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