Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America
As much as Tate’s sentences still crackle and pop off the page, the new Flyboy edition does carry the baggage of being a collection of pieces mostly written for a weekly bolt of newsprint roughly thirty-five to forty-five years ago. They inevitably have lost a lot of immediacy ... What this reissue of the first Flyboy lacks is some structural furniture to buttress against that creeping threat of datedness ... One thing this edition gets completely right is its timing, since for the past year we’ve collectively been revisiting the culture wars of the ’80s with only the mildest revisions.
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There are plenty of dad jokes and corny puns in Flyboy, as well as intellectual dead ends and some unnecessarily cruel jokes. (The legacy of ’80s rock crit.) But 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.
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Tate has the eloquence, anger, and wit to succeed in his commentary where other impassioned critics have failed ... Erudite music criticism ... This is essential reading for anyone who wants to get a grasp of not just black, but all contemporary American culture.
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