The Village Voice ran my Wu-Tang Clan’s 8 Diagrams, one of like three or four pieces they seem to have run on the album if you include their critique of the new Ghostface, The Big Doe Rehab. I make the point in the rev that 8 Diagrams – maligned in the press by three of Wu-Tang’s own members (GZA since recanted) – is at least as good as what Jay-Z and Kanye West put out this year. I just read my man Shaheem Reid’s year-end list over on MTV.com, with Jigga, Ye, and no Wu-Tang but 50 Cent! (We once worked at Vibe together… peace Sha!)

For my money, the most interesting news in hiphop all year was that Trent Reznor got behind the boards for the latest Saul Williams record, chockfull of trashing, headnodding Public Enemy/NIN hodgepodges. As 50 Cent studiously pieced together Curtis for his multiplatinum fanbase, what seems to have escaped him is that his audience consists of mostly white collegiate wannabe-downs of the type that bought over seven million Vanilla Ice albums 17 years ago. (That crowd eventually started buying The Source, dumped their MC Hammer CDs and quickly got hip to what’s really good in the hood.) It’s not an audience to be that proud of, as arrogant as the SoundScan-killa businessman acts about the whole thing.

That’s all.

What this all says about the black male identity is what makes it really interesting, aside from 50 getting his ass kicked in the only arena (SoundScan) that seems to mean anything to him. Black men in America are conditioned to feel as though the musclebound hard-attitude persona is what makes a black man a black man, and to fall outside that mold is to be… nerdy or oreo or just soft. What Kanye’s success could say is that society is opening up its conceptions of what constitutes a black man. Just maybe.

We (us black men) have been saying all along that we’re not just Stagger Lee and John Henry, but also Duke Ellington, Colin Powell, Prince, James Baldwin, Bob Marley, Bill T. Jones, etc. Whut?

My story boils down to the fact that, at 16, I hated Michael Jackson’s video for “Bad.” The Martin Scorsese-directed one in the faux NYC train station, with the thug life Wesley Snipes and the “you ain’t bad, you ain’t nuthin!” (“Translation: niggas ain’t shit,” Tate later wrote.)

As was MJ’s style for many years, the video debuted on the major networks so families everywhere could settle in with the popcorn and revel in the thing together. MJ fans in their 20s at the time probably lit a spliff in preparation for the 8 o’clock chime. Anyway, 15 minutes later, I hated it. My mother loved it. The clip seemed an obvious repudiation of his blackness and… what was with the pleather and buckles? Mom and Dad liked it; was I bugging?

The next week, The Village Voice dropped (yeah, I was a 16-year-old Voice reader), and “I’m White!” by Greg Tate explained everything about the video that I couldn’t articulate to my folks. I didn’t show them his piece; it was enough that some mysterious cat out there somewhere knew exactly where I was coming from. Like, somebody else besides me gets it.

In my 14 years of cultural criticism, I don’t know that I’ve engendered that feeling in any impressionable teenagers out there over the years. But I’m glad to call Tate a friend these days. We did a reading together at Harlem’s Hue-Man Bookstore last year (above) talking about Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, and he wiped the floor with me. Of course.