I have always admired the culture critic Nelson George. I discovered him in the early ’90s in the pages of the Village Voice. Then, as now, he mostly wrote about leading figures and developments in black popular culture with a warm, penetrating intelligence. Unlike the pugnacious prose of the jazz critic Stanley Crouch, the academic militancy of Michele Wallace, or the intellectual hipness of Greg Tate (all of whom wrote for the Voice in the ’80s and ’90s, and all of whom I, as a critic for this weekly, owe a deep debt), George was always direct, encyclopedic, and entertaining. His essays and reviews revealed the mind of a historian. He consistently provided a rich background to explain a trend in R&B, hiphop, funk, and soul. A pop tune, for him, was never an isolated thing but a part of a larger picture that included politics, economics, urban currents, and race relations…
