Greg Tate: Critical Everything Theory

At its best, critical writing gives you a living, breathing encounter with a work of art. Not through adjectives, terminology, or impressionistic prose but through the fabric and weave of the writing itself. Not mimetically, either—like some ritalin-Kerouac prose striving to “sound like bebop”—but intrinsically. Certain critics extend a poet’s or improviser’s reach for whatever handy words will encode a human experience into their argument. Peter Schjeldahl still does this about fine art, and Greg Tate did this so well and so consistently about form as new and explosive as ‘80s-90s hip-hop that whenever you saw his name atop a column of text in the Village Voice, it was less like spotting a new article than cracking open the jewel case of hype CD or opening an illicit bindle at a party that was now about to truly jump off. Greg Tate’s writing brought that dopamine spike, and it lasted long after the initial high.

He was just a blast to read, on anything, and, given that he was writing about ’80s hip-hop in ’80s New York City, he had this kind of terrifying authority that it’s hard to even assess now. To a generation of budding writers, academics, and artists, Tate was also the first intellectual to convey his ideas in a completely unaffected mix of critical theory, hip-hop street talk, folksy dudespeak, and hype-man glee—a style as unreproducible as Monk’s or Nabokov’s, with their kind of palpable erudition. Imitate it and you sound like a braying jackass. That voice was probably too blazingly literate to exist in any real-life space besides the page, but there it was a universe.

After hearing that Tate had died, I found some quotations where he described his seminal Village Voice writing as an attempt to sound like hip-hop on the page. I get what he means, and with something as verbose, free-form, and multi-referential as hip-hop, it makes sense. But if that’s all it was, a generation of budding writers wouldn’t have hung on every single word Tate wrote about James Baldwin, the Bad Brains, Basquiat, Sun Ra, Nirvana, or any other subject he took on, subjects that either preceded or followed the creative and intellectual peak of hip-hop that Tate effectively co-produced himself. Some might call him Clement Greenberg to rap’s Abstract-Expressionists, but those people wouldn’t have commanded Tate’s readership.

“Somebody once ex­plained the difference between the minds of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk as Powell being more likely to drop a heavy insight on you about the state of the world and Monk being more likely to lay something deep on you about Monk.” This, from a 1988 piece on Eric B and Rakim. And check the off-hand schooling in this piec on Jean Michel Basquiet a year later. “My maternal grandfather used to say, Son, no matter where you go in this world and no matter what you find, somewhere up in there you will find a Negro. Experience has yet to prove him wrong, especially where the avant-garde is concerned. In Wilfredo Lam we had our Cubist adventurer. Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and LeRoi Jones bopped heads with the Beats. The British Invasion got vamped on by Jimi Hendrix while Arthur Lee and Sly Stone were spear-chucking protopunk and funk into San Francisco’s psychedelic Summer of Love. Bad Brains reclaimed Rasta and hardcore rock and roll from the punks.” And this, from an aside in a ’91 piece about ’60s Black Nationalism: “I’ll be stunned if Spike overcomes his immaturity as a storyteller and makes a film with anything approaching the complexity of Malcolm’s world and worldview, but c’est la vie. Ain’t nothing but a movie y’all, and after those two hours in the dark are over, we’ll all still have to get up the next morning and deal with being Black men and women in America. Which at the end of the day is about what? Learning to love and struggle with one another, end of story.”

Half the time, you were eavesdropping on Tate’s counsel to righteous intelligent Black America, half the time he was explaining why you loved what you loved so much. I spent a day wondering why Tate’s death felt like such a personal loss to me, a 50-something whiteboy recovering critic/writer who’s one of thousands who considered him the absolute pinnacle of critical, or even non-fiction writing. But when I spotted a glowing review of his group Burnt Sugar Arkestra’s last album — in fact, a rare A from Christgau, awarded pre-humously — it clicked: Greg Tate was also that rare, often suspect thing that I was and still feel like, a musician-critic.

For most of my childhood, I read and wrote academically and privately, and studied and played music the same way. By late high school, jazz-nerddom connected me to one community while, in my 20s, academic and journalist criticism connected me to another, and there was a Chinese Wall between them. Participation in both got you vibed as a traitor to the cause of one. I wonder if Tate was also on bandstands or recording sessions where fellow musicians, slagging the published ignorati, caught his eye, and said some version of Whatever, man, y’all know critics are bitches. Or if heard some version of that from the white intellectual rock-crit massive, where one post-punk tenet has it that a corrupting, over-facility on an instrument means you’re covertly in league with Kenny G. (And btw: forgive me if I skip that new doc about himself; I spent enough time in ’90s laundromats and DMVs to know dude’s oxygen-depleting sound as well as I know that tons of people love it.) A guitarist and band leader, Tate cofounded the Black Rock Coalition and has led Burnt Sugar Arkestra in its conducted improvisations for two decades, years I often wish he’d spent more time writing. Ten years ago, my editor at Riverhead Press was trying to enlist Tate for what would clearly be the definitive book about James Brown. I read that he signed on to the project but doubt we’ll ever see it now.

But Tate was clearly thriving creatively, as a quick listen to “Angels Over Oakanda” tells you. That’s all I’ve given it so far, but saying that it sounds like a contemporary version of In a Silent Way- or Agharta-era Miles isn’t exactly faint praise. And it’s unlike those records in that it sounds organically created rather than patched together in post, the product of a large, blended family of avant-New Yorkers listening to each other, respecting each other’s space and voices, playing openly, bravely, lovingly.

I bet that part of what made Greg Tate such a powerful writer is that he listened and wrote like a musician, by which I don’t mean more intelligently or more knowledgeably. I mean he did it with a certain focus and patience, an attentiveness to different details, maybe a deeper sympathy. Playing jazz-adjacent music takes so many years of devotion before you rise to the level of doing it badly. I know, I rose to that level. Writing about the music doesn’t, not really. Not even in the age of editorial gate keepers like the hallowed ‘80s-‘90s Village Voice. Writing is also hard, tedious, and lonely, and it feels that way most of the time. Playing music with people never does. Neither does reading writers like Tate. He’s one of those writers who gave you a lifelong practice, a way of relating to whatever the world offers or foists on you, and I can’t thank him enough.