Uh-oh.

Apparently, I should watch out, after criticizing Stanley Crouch.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in the Village Voice:

Stanley Crouch is a gangsta rapper. Throughout his career, Crouch has moved through black nationalism, bohemia, and places we haven't yet developed the vocab to name. But if there's one thing we've gleaned from Crouch's recent assault on novelist and critic Dale Peck, it is this—we have found Crouch's muse, and his name is Suge Knight.

The backstory is simple, and for Crouch routine. On July 12, out for lunch at Tartine in the West Village, Crouch spotted Peck, who'd trashed his book Don't the Moon Look Lonesome a few years back. After greeting Peck with one hand, Crouch smacked him with the other. "What I would actually have preferred to happen," says Crouch, "was that I had the presence of mind to hawk up a huge oyster and spit it in his face."

Of course! Who doesn't have regrets that they did not spit phlegm upon someone who had criticized them?

Crouch's literary mean-streak is well-known, going so far as to pen vitriolic, ad-hominem attacks against his critics. Who knew that streak extended to fisticuffs? Well, apparently the entire Village Voice staff:

"Stanley deserves better than his own temper" says jazz writer Peter Watrous, who also worked here with Crouch. "There are two things that happen at the same time—one of them is that Stanley is a utopian. He strongly believes people should behave in certain way. That combines with an inability to control his own temper, and it makes for a bullying streak."

There was the time Crouch was arguing with jazz writer Russ Musto and told him that if he were a foot taller he'd knock his block off. Musto kept arguing, since he knew he wasn't growing any. Crouch went back on his word, and swung at him anyway. After the two men were separated, Crouch calmed down and offered to buy Musto a drink. Musto says they're friends to this day. Then there's what happened to Guy Trebay, whom Crouch stalked through the Voice's old offices threatening to kill him, relenting only after writer Hilton Als intervened. Another time, writer Harry Allen approached Crouch, hoping to exchange some notes on hip-hop. Instead Crouch, evidently in a bad mood, caught Allen's neck in the cobra clutch, prompting the Voice to give Crouch his walking papers.

By then the Hanging Judge had secured his rep as king of the literal literary brawlers—an accolade that ranks right up there with prettiest journalist. Really now, administering beat-downs to pencil-necked critics is about as macho as spousal abuse, croquet—or gangsta rap.

Much like the acts he derides, Crouch has a taste for swinging that is nothing short of a variation on the "I ain't no punk" theme seemingly encoded on the DNA of all black males. "I have a kind of Mailer-esque reaction to the way some people view writers," Crouch once told The New Yorker. "I want them to know that just because I write doesn't mean I can't also fight." Put another way, Crouch wants you know he keeps it gangsta.

Um... I don't even know what to say.

It's a shame that this man's views represent(ed) the idea of jazz to the American public. Or rather, his own demented conception of jazz.