Greg Tate, a music and cultural critic who elevated hip-hop to a cultural phenomenon with the kind of respect and acclaim jazz has received, has died. He was 64 years old.
Laura Sell, spokeswoman for Duke University Press, which publishes the Tate “Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader” In 2016, confirmed his death on Tuesday.
The reason was not immediately available.
Tate began to make an impact on popular music and criticism in the 1980s as a staff writer for New York’s Village Voice, and he eventually contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post and Vibe. He was the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies and lectured here Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Source magazine called him “one of the godfathers of hip-hop journalism”.
Tate praised The Voice’s music critic, Robert Christgau, for hiring him in 1981. He is quoted as saying that Christgau “believed that Afro-diasporic music should be covered by people who were no strangers to those communities.”
Early hip-hop, however, was rarely a theme for Rolling Stone. While it attracted the attention of the mostly white critical of pop, it was often seen as the bubble-gum craze responsible for bright, baggy and tasteless fashion. It is rarely taken seriously.
Tate swung it, smoked it, and released dissertation-worthy observations.
It’s hard to find a greatest-ever Emmys list today that doesn’t have Rakim near the top. in 1988, Tate reviews Eric B and Rakim’s latest single By freeing up space for both on the top shelf of American music giants including Miles Davis.
“The music on ‘Follow the Leader’ is spooky, a science-fiction score that sounds straight from the Tangerine Dream Songbook,” he wrote in The Voice. “Rakim is on an eloquent speed-travel, a black bullet train sliding through hyperspace.”
He also wrote about rock ‘n’ roll, hardcore, jazz. simple art And “The Black Beauty of Post-Nationalism.” He played guitar, co-founded the Black Rock Writers’ Coalition, and founded Burn Sugar the Orchestral Chamber, which is described in about it. Website “As a vast band of musicians whose eccentric personnel allow them to freely juggle a broad swath of the experimental soul-jazz-hip hop spectrum.”
In 1986 Village Voice Essay On Black American Aesthetic, Tate wrote in a parenthetical aside, “It’s our music, especially jazz, that confronts Western culture at its most intimidating and impossible other: sui generis Black Genius.”
Tate was born in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Washington, D.C., and was influenced by both the Rolling Stone critics and the writings of Amiri Baraka. ArtForum International MagazineWho first gave the news of his death.
He studied film and journalism at Howard University.
“I went to New York in ’81, like hip-hop was flying,” he told New York magazine in 2016. “The radio wasn’t playing hip-hop. There was no video. The only way I found out about KRS-Ek, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane and Public Enemy was word-of-mouth. It was very underground conversation, but 80’s Being in New York in the 1990s, we were basically at the center of world culture.”
One of Tate’s early adventures, new yorker Staff writer Hua Soo noted in 2016, helping to establish “jazz and hip-hop as part of the same continuum of expression.”
For the hip-hop generation, now old enough to feature on tribute pages, Tate’s approval may be a revelation. “The form of his writing can be as exhilarating as art,” Hsu wrote.
Tet was celebrated among peers and artists.
hip-hop writer Michael A. gonzalez It was written in 2007 that Tate’s 50th birthday party at the Studio Museum in Harlem was attended by Vernon Reed, Dream Hampton, Kevin Powell, Maureen McMahon and other veterans.
Like many hip-hop writers, Los Angeles journalist Donnell Alexander, a University of Southern California Journalism Fellow and the author of “Ghetto Celebrity: I’m Looking for My Father,” said Tate that influenced his career.
“He was one of the first writers I wanted to be,” he said by email. “I’m reading the Village Voices music section. I almost literally couldn’t believe column inches were real, it was so dark and silly.”
Tate’s bibliography “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America” (1992), “Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture” (2003), “Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience” (2003) included. ), and “Flyboy 2.”
Tuesday’s staff writer for The New Yorker magazine jelani kobbo, one MSNBC contributor tweeted that “Flyboy in the Buttermilk” is “a clinic on literary genius.”
Alexander said that one of Tate’s effects was to seduce readers with pop music, but then take them down a different path.
“Tate references sci-fi,” he said. “He had a hip-hop feel to a piece about rock. He wrote about weird jazz albums with such passion that I had no idea the form’s relevance was fading. It was all about that possibility.” I was dazzling in what it presented.”
His death is sad, Sikandar said, but it will open his eyes.
“It’s exciting to think how many more people are going to read him now,” he said.