Spent four glorious days last week in my original NYC home sweet home. Swung by the offices of Vibe and Spin (still a building apart after all these years) last Friday. Wrote something in the latest 15th anniversary issue of Vibe, a “best songs of the Vibe era” thing with some of the illustrious mag’s other bygone music editors: Erik Parker, Jon Caramanica, Danyel Smith (currently head editor-in-chief). I’ll write reams one day about writers’ and readers’ love/hate relationship with Vibe since its inception, but for now: happy anniversary, guys. I popped by Spin for a copy of their old April 2006 issue with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Never got to see writer Sean Howe’s review of my 33 1/3 book on Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On. They gave it a B-, and I was a pretty B- student, so there it is. The Spin review:

In 1971 Sylvester Stewart (a.k.a. Sly Stone) took an unlikely approach to creating utopian pop: In a Bel Air mansion he mixed PCP and cocaine, surrounded himself with shotguns, an ex-pimp turned bodyguard, and drum machines, and produced a darkly brilliant record that made “Everyday People” sound like a sham. But in this entry in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of classic album dissections, Lewis retreads too much backstory from Joel Selvin and Dave Marsh’s superior Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History (which details baby-eating pit bulls and twin-sister threesomes), leaving himself a mere 20 pages to riff on the record itself.

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.