Rick Perlstein considers the works of Stanley Crouch and Lisa Jones:
One summer over 15 years ago, three books crossed my horizon at exactly the same time. One was Greg Tate‘s Flyboy in the Buttermilk. The second was Stanley Crouch’s Notes of a Hanging Judge. The third was Lisa Jones’ Bulletproof Diva. Read simultaneously, they sent me into a fugue state. They were, indeed, a fugue: three story lines entwining contrapuntally across the same harmonic field. All of them were collections of columns from the Village Voice from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, essayistic commentary from an African American perspective, intellectually allusive, mostly on culture but also suffusively political. Each author’s obsessions overlapped: the politics of black music, of style, of gender; the meaning of freedom and community — and, most dramatically, their common psychic entanglement with a single fraught figure: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, the black nationalist poet and jazz writer who came to prominence in the 1960s.
