Greg Tate a powerful chronicler and critic of Black life and culture

Greg Tate, the essential music writer, cultural critic and journalist, has died. He was 64. The news was confirmed by a spokesperson at Duke University Press, his publisher. No further details were provided. Starting in 1987, Tate was a longtime staff writer for The Village Voice, where he documented all facets of Black culture for the storied alt-weekly. Tate covered everything from Eric B. u0026 Rakim to the changing nature of Black identity and the death of Michael Jackson.The Voice was the recorder, messenger and proclamatory dictator of what culturally mattered in the province, Tate told NPR, after The Village Voice announced the end of its print version. In 1992, Tate published his first book, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. It tackled race, politics, music, and literature, and was required reading for anyone approaching culture (popular or otherwise) through the lens of criticism. As a stylist, Tate was assertive, artful, funny and expressive. His pieces, whether they were book reviews or essays or notes from a concert, always reminded you that art didn"t exist in a vacuum â€" that it existed in the real world, and had real-world causes and effects. In grappling with the Black hardcore band Bad Brains in The Village Voice, Tate writes:And that"s a relatively positive writeup. Like any good critic, Tate went in on the things he hated with just as much flair as he did the things he loved. Writing about the rap group Public Enemy, Tate took to task the sexism, homophobia and antisemitism he found in their work. Greg Tate was born on Oct. 15, 1957. He spent his teenage years in Washington, D. C., where he first got interested in music. Upon moving to New York City, he co-founded the Black Rock Coalition, which existed to push back against stereotypes of Black artists. He also founded Burnt Sugar, a sprawling avant-garde orchestra that melded elements of free jazz and fusion, Ru0026B, funk and contemporary classical music through conduction, a system of real-time arranging pioneered by improvising conductor Butch Morris. The ensemble issued its most recent recording, the EP Angels Over Oakanda, in September. After The Voice, Tate would go on to write for a variety of different media outletsâ€" Rolling Stone, the BBC, Down Beat and more. His last piece was from September in The Nation, surveying the current Black cultural landscape through the lens of the book Afropessimism, by Frank B. Wilderson III. James Baldwin said, "To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time," wrote Tate. But what he didn"t say was that, on a good day, it is mostly a sublimated state of rage since folk got bills to pay and sanity to keep.\n All data is taken from the source: http://npr.org Article Link: https://www.npr.org/2021/12/07/1062137384/greg-tate-music-critic-author-journalist-dead #tate #newmovies #newstodaydonaldtrump #bbcnewstoday #newstodaycnn #newsworldfox #


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