Greg Tate dies

Why it matters

Greg Tate died on December 7, 2021, in Brooklyn, of complications from heart and kidney conditions. He was 64. Greg Tate is the writer who, more than any other single critic, established that hip-hop deserved the same level of serious literary and political critical attention as any other Black-American art form. His Village Voice column, which ran from 1987 through the early 2000s, was the venue where the major rap albums of the late 80s and early 90s got their first sustained intellectual treatment. His 1992 collection Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America consolidated the work into book form and remains one of the foundational documents of post-1980 Black cultural criticism. His prose was dense, allusive, often deliberately challenging; he wrote about Miles Davis and Public Enemy and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the same essay and assumed the reader could follow. The Burnt Sugar Arkestra, the band he led for the last twenty years of his life, was a parallel creative project to the writing. He was 64. The criticism of hip-hop, as a discipline and as a body of literature, runs through what he built. You should read Flyboy in the Buttermilk. The book is still in print.