Greg Tate

Gregory Stephen Tate (October 14, 1957 – December 7, 2021) was an American writer, musician, and producer. A long-time critic for The Village Voice, Tate focused particularly on African-American music and culture, helping to establish hip-hop as a genre worthy of music criticism. Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America collected 40 of his works for the Voice and he published a sequel, Flyboy 2, in 2016. A musician himself, he was a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition and the leader of Burnt Sugar.

In 2024, Tate was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.

Early life and education Gregory Stephen Tate was born on October 14, 1957, in Dayton, Ohio. His parents Charles and Florence (Grinner) Tate were civil rights movement activists involved in the Congress of Racial Equality, and played Malcolm X's speeches and Nina Simone's music around the house. As a teenager, Tate taught himself how to play guitar. He attended Howard University, where he studied journalism and film.

Career

Early career and music In 1981, following an introduction by family friend Thulani Davis, In 1985, he co-founded the Black Rock Coalition (BRC) with some of the African-American musicians he knew who had a common interest in playing rock music, writing in a manifesto that the group "opposes those racist and reactionary forces within the American music industry which undermine and purloin our musical legacy and deny Black artists the expressive freedom and economic rewards that our Caucasian counterparts enjoy as a matter of course."

In 1999, Tate established Burnt Sugar, an improvisational ensemble that varies in size from approximately 12 to 40 musicians and blended a range of genres including funk, free jazz, and psychedelic rock. described it in 2004 as "a band I wanted to hear but could not find."

Writing Though initially a freelancer, Tate quickly became the leading critic on Black culture for the Voice and in that position, one of the leading cultural critics in New York City. He developed a reputation for "slangy erudition;" Hua Hsu writes: "His best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon; they were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn't have got along but did." in the essay, he juxtaposes the "somewhat stultified stereotype of the black intellectual as one who operates from a narrow-minded, essentialized notion of black culture" with the "many vibrant colors and dynamics of African American life and art," His work was also published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Artforum, DownBeat, Essence, JazzTimes, Rolling Stone, and VIBE. At Vibe he became a columnist in 1992, titling his series "Black-Owned". A key contribution was his conceptualization of hip-hop as existing on a continuum with jazz,

In 1992, Tate published Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, a collection of 40 essays on culture and politics, drawn from his writing for the Village Voice. Writing for Pitchfork, Allison Hussey said: "It became a definitive work for Tate," treating subjects like Miles Davis, Public Enemy, and Jean Michel Basquiat.

Tate had the admiration of many of the musicians he wrote about, like David Bowie and Flea; Flea cried in appreciation when Tate reviewed the Peppers' 1999 album Californication.

In 2003, Tate published Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, an edited collection of 18 Black writers addressing the topic of white appropriation of Black art. The same year, he published Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix And The Black Experience, an appraisal of Hendrix as a Black icon.

In 2016, Tate published Flyboy 2. In The New Yorker, Hua Hsu wrote that this follow-up to his first collection brought "into sharper focus" Tate's interest in what Tate described as “the way Black people ‘think,’ mentally, emotionally, physically,” and “how those ways of thinking and being inform [their] artistic choices."

Personal life Tate had a daughter, Chinara Tate, born circa 1979.

Tate died of cardiac arrest on December 7, 2021, in New York City, at the age of 64. That night, the Apollo Theater in Harlem displayed his name on the marquee in remembrance of him as a cultural icon.

Works Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Editor.

Co-editor with Liz Munsell. Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-hop Generation. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts. 2020. .