Critic, author, and musician Greg Tate has passed away: NPR

Greg Tate, in 2016.

Nisha Sondhe / Duke University Press

hide captions

switch captions

Nisha Sondhe / Duke University Press

Greg Tate, in 2016.

Nisha Sondhe / Duke University Press

Greg Tate, writer, cultural critic and essential journalist, has passed away. He was 64 years old. A spokesperson for Duke University Press, his publisher, confirmed the news. No further details are provided.

Beginning in 1987, Tate was a longtime staff writer for NS village voice, where he documents all aspects of Black culture for the week. Tate covers everything from Eric B. & Rakim with the changing nature of Black identity and the death of Michael Jackson.

“NS Voice was the recorder, messenger and dictator declaring what was culturally important in the province,” Tate told NPR, after The Village Voice notice the end of its printed version.

Black writers can’t Not aware of situation irony; write completely black as you would for a press agency that is considered very white and gay in the hood. But you also know that your own more ethnically diverse community is reading this, too.

Your audience can also support you. I actually received death threats from the newspaper’s equally passionate letterwriters – someone in the form of Yoruba curse – after I wrote a piece about Michael Jackson Bad 1987 under the title “I’m White!”

In 1992, Tate published his first book, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. It deals with race, politics, music, and literature, and is required reading for anyone who approaches culture (popular or otherwise) through a critical lens.

As a stylist, Tate is assertive, artistic, funny and expressive. His works, whether it’s book reviews or essays or notes from a concert, always remind you that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum – that it exists in the real world. , and there are real-world causes and effects. Wrestling with the band Black Hard Brains, Bad Brains in The Village Voice, Tate wrote:

You say you want hardcore? I say Brain will give you strength straight up your ass, man. I’m talking about like hammer bone surgery, like a whirlpool tub in a cement mixer, like Black & Decker’s orthodontic surgery, like making love with a hacksaw, honey. Meaning coming from a black perspective, no, jazz isn’t, it’s not hard, and they’ll probably never open for Dick Dames or Primps. Even though the three white man actions they did, Butch Tarantulas, All Four Caves, and Cash, all were deeper into black street puzzles than Brains ever had, and it wasn’t a dog. what?

And that’s a relatively positive note.

Like any good critic, Tate takes on the things he hates with as much ingenuity as the things he loves. Writing about the rap group Public Enemy, Tate has taken on a mission to fight sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. he found in their work.

Since PEs show good reason when they focus on racism as a tool of the US power structure, they must be smart enough to realize that gays, women, and Jews are marginalized. dehumanizing will not set the black man free. As their prophet Mr Farrakhan failed to get over one or the other of these moral errors, PE might not either. Because now swallowing PE tablets means swallowing bitterly, later if they don’t grow up, they will be criminals.

Greg Tate was born on October 15, 1957. He spent his teenage years in Washington, DC, where he first became interested in music. When he moved to New York City, he co-founded Black Rock Alliance, which exists to push back against stereotypes about Black artists. He also founded Burnt Sugar, a vibrant avant-garde orchestra that combines elements of free and fusion jazz, R&B, funk and contemporary classical music through lead, an arrangement system. in real time pioneered by improvisational conductors. Butch Morris. The band released their most recent record, EP Angels on Oakanda, in September.

After Voice, Tate will continue to write for various media outlets— Rolling Stone, BBC, Beats down and more. His last work is from September of nation, survey the current Black cultural landscape through the lens of the book Invisibilityism, by Frank B. Wilderson III. “James Baldwin said, ‘To be a black person in this country and be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage nearly all the time,'” Tate wrote. “But what he didn’t say was, on a clear day it’s mostly a state of sublimated rage because folk have bills to pay and sanity to keep.”