So it looks like Kanye won the contest, outselling 50 Cent with 718,000 to 603,000 so far.

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?

Here’s a story I haven’t told often enough. It’s about Greg Tate, who nails a nice 50 vs. Kanye piece in The Village Voice this week.

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.