‘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).