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    An Afrofuturism Festival Brings an Energy Shift to Carnegie Hall

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    The inaugural event explored a movement about denial and transcendence in the most institutional music hall in New York City.The first time Sun Ra and his Arkestra played Carnegie Hall, in April 1968, they were shrouded in darkness for most of the show. The critic John S. Wilson, reviewing for The New York Times, was flummoxed. Wilson considered himself a Sun Ra fan, but he couldn’t fathom why, on the country’s most prestigious stage, the cosmic keyboardist, bandleader and philosopher was keeping his ensemble’s wondrous “array of odd instruments” and “colorful costumes” out of view.The messages in Ra’s music, and his riddle-like public statements, could’ve helped Wilson understand. “​​On this planet, it seems, it has been very difficult for me to do and be of the possible things,” Ra said in an interview for DownBeat magazine in 1970. “As I look at the world today and its events and the harvest of possible things, I like the idea of the impossible more and more.” Perhaps the most appealing impossibility, for Ra, was to escape — to disappear.The Arkestra returned to Carnegie Hall in February, almost three decades after Ra’s death, to help kick-start the hall’s first-ever Afrofuturism festival, a series of concerts on its major stages, with satellite events held in smaller venues across New York, around the country and online. Those programs included screenings of sci-fi films made by Black directors, comics lectures and panels on social theory.All tied back to Afrofuturism, an artistic movement that mixes realistic racial pessimism with audacious fantasy, and that holds an increasingly prominent place in culture today. Afrofuturism picks up on a more than century-old mode in Black American art: fusing the tools of sci-fi and surrealism with the histories and belief systems of African societies, particularly in Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria, in search of new models.The trumpeter Theo Croker made his debut performance at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in March alongside the keyboardist Mike King, the bassist Eric Wheeler and the drummer Shekwoaga Ode.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times“You can call Afrofuturism the high culture of the African diaspora right now,” Reynaldo Anderson, a Temple University scholar and a co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, said in an interview. He was on the five-person committee of scholars and artists that curated the festival, and he sounded well aware of the inherent contradictions of trying to bring a movement about denial and transcendence into the most institutional music hall in New York City.“The Carnegie function is going to be remembered as bringing all those threads together at a mainstream institution,” he said. “I think we made the argument successfully.”That’s partly because the artists they chose knew how to treat reclamation as a viable alternative to escape. Camae Ayewa, a speculative poet and electronic musician who performs as Moor Mother, sat in with the Arkestra toward the end of its set. “I was never here,” she recited, invoking Ra, over the large ensemble’s turbid, thumping swing. “From 1619 to Wakanda, I don’t exist/Whose map is this? Whose timeline?”Then she issued a warning, seemingly to herself: “Don’t be truth in front of the vultures/Don’t be truth in Carnegie Hall.”The festival’s performances were stacked with moments like this: disruptions of the space, caught between gratitude and suspicion. All the performers seemed sincerely thrilled to be there, and nearly all of them went out of their way to say how welcomed they’d been by the staff and the curators. Most also expressed a kind of surprise.Fatoumata Diawara, the incendiary Malian vocalist, guitarist and songwriter, headlined a bill in Zankel Hall that also featured Chimurenga Renaissance, a transnational band mixing hip-hop, lounge music, Zimbabwean protest songs and Afrobeats. Diawara and her five-piece band administered energy to the room as an undiluted concentrate, playing distorted, tension-ratcheting desert blues and dance music from the West African coast.Her songs are mostly in Bambara, which she sings over tightly riveted rhythms drawn from the Wassoulou region of Mali or the highlife tradition of Ghana. She, too, insisted on the right to remain partly unknown. “Many people told me, ‘Why don’t you sing in English?’” she mused between songs. “I don’t need to sing in English to connect with you guys!” A roar rose up to agree, but the point was already proved.Fatoumata Diawara performed with a band featuring Sam Dickey on bass and Victor Campbell on drums.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesDiawara did one song in English: “Sinnerman,” the old spiritual and Nina Simone staple. By the time the quintet reached a canter, many in the crowd had stood up to dance, and those still in their seats seemed to have loosened up completely. It rearranged the energy in the room, made it unrulier. Not long after, in an encore, she pulled up about 10 audience members to dance with her, and the disarray spread to the stage.There was nothing blatantly futuristic about Diawara’s performance, and she was one of a few artists on the bill who have not made a point of nominally affiliating themselves with Afrofuturism. But it felt unbounded, in a way that made you think about how tightly energy like this is often asked to be kept in when it’s not onstage.By contrast, the flutist Nicole Mitchell often does compose for her Black Earth Ensemble with the science-fiction writings of Octavia Butler in mind. Mitchell and her band gave one of the most consistently breathtaking performances of the festival. Mixing Mitchell’s streaked, blustery flute and echoing effects with the inchoate, chewed-up speech sounds of Mankwe Ndosi; the earthy, shifting beats of the drummer Avreeayl Ra; and the contributions of a small crowd of acoustic instrumentalists, this was music with drive and narrative of its own, but it seemed to make every move in anticipation of something far grander to come. That grand thing never quite arrived, which also felt right.The Detroit techno luminary Carl Craig led a group that included four fellow synthesizer artists and a concert pianist, all playing together, and just about everything they did was grandiose. He leaned into fan favorites from the 1990s, and delivered a key insight during his stage banter: Most of the beats he made as a young person, he said, were crafted with the idea that they might one day become the soundtrack to a “Blade Runner” movie.The Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble performed grandiose versions of fan favorites from his early days.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOpening the festival on Feb. 12, Flying Lotus, who may be Craig’s best-known heir, played a sold-out show at the nearly 3,000-seat Stern Auditorium, flanked by the harpist Brandee Younger and the violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Draped in a white robe, and huddled over what looked like an ice sculpture crowned with a laptop, he ran through new and old material, heaving from agitated beats to wide-open airscapes that the three musicians gradually curved and bent. Abstract projections crawled across the ceiling; the elegant molding overhead became electric goo.The term “Afrofuturism” was coined by the (white) cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, the year Ra died, in a series of interviews he’d conducted with Black writers: Samuel R. Delany, a novelist; Tricia Rose, a hip-hop scholar; and Greg Tate, a music and cultural critic. Those interviews, for a special edition of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, are revealing in a number of ways. In them, Dery framed the proposition of Afrofuturism as a conundrum. “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” he wondered.But Tate — an expert across the fields of jazz, film, comics, Black history and cultural studies — countered, pointing out: “You can be backward-looking and forward-thinking at the same time.” In fact, that very action sits at the center of Black cultural practice, especially in music. “I see science fiction as continuing a vein of philosophical inquiry and technological speculation that begins with the Egyptians and their incredibly detailed meditations on life after death,” Tate said.Shelley Nicole of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber steps to center stage.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesTate’s sudden death in December at 64 sent a chill through the world of arts and letters. Writing since the early 1980s for The Village Voice and other publications, he had been the rare figure who could comfortably present the patois and perspective of everyday Black life to a mainstream (read: white) audience, without any act of translation or dilution. His presence at the festival would have been meaningful.His shadow loomed generously instead. And for the festival’s closing night on Sunday, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, the genre-stirring big band that Tate co-founded in the late 1990s, played two sets of thrashing, syncopated music: five vocalists, seven horn players, two drummers and two bassists, all in the flow. Bringing the show to a close, the guitarist Vernon Reid delivered a last homage to Tate. Reid and the band chanted Tate’s phone number back and forth, and he asked over and over: “Whose band is this?”“Tate’s!”Reid continued: “He wanted you to make a sound. If you made a sound from your heart, you were in the Burnt Sugar Band.”Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber’s set was in many ways a homage to Tate, its co-founder.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times More

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      Remembering Greg Tate, Critic and Catalyst

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherGreg Tate, the pioneering critic, died last December at 64. His 1992 anthology “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America” is a startling document of the innovations taking place in the Black music, film and art of the time, and also a guidebook for a sui generis style of writing that was deeply lyrical on its own terms.Tate’s criticism was political, empathetic and skeptical all at once. It valued exuberant expressiveness along with a mischievous twist, and sought out the most provocative creators and rewarded them with close attention and, when warranted, loving scrutiny.On this week’s Popcast, conversations with two of Tate’s contemporaries about the fertile Black writing and arts scene in New York in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the overlap between creators and critics, and the impression Tate left on his peers and on those who came after.Guests:Michael A. Gonzales, who writes about music and true crime and is the co-author of “Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture”Joan Morgan, program director at the Center for Black Visual Culture, N.Y.U. Institute of African American Affairs, and the author of “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      The Vitality of Black Criticism

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      Before his death, Greg Tate spoke with four other critics at the Pop Conference about the need for Black writers to face down racist institutions and take the lead in cultural conversations.Last month, popular music lost one of its greatest philosophers and storytellers: The critic, scholar, teacher, musician and New York City grass-roots cultural icon Greg Tate, a towering intellect and a modern-day griot, died at 64. His singular critical prose — in The Village Voice and Vibe, among other outlets, and collected in two anthologies — seamlessly fused dense, dazzling vernacular wisdom and street corner wit with equally intricate ivory tower analytic discourse.When I set out to organize the “dream team” lineup for a round-table session titled “Black Critics Matter” for the 2021 Pop Conference — an annual gathering of journalists, academics, musicians and other creatives — Tate was the first person I contacted. In his 40-year career as a working critic, he revolutionized the form and content of music journalism by centering Blackness as both the analytic framework to engage and experience popular music as well as the language to tell the story of the music itself in living color.Our April session included three other pioneering writers: the critic, poet, novelist, playwright, librettist and scholar Thulani Davis; the New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris; and the veteran music journalist Danyel Smith, the host of the “Black Girl Songbook” podcast and author of the forthcoming “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.” Below are edited excerpts from the hour-plus panel. (The full conversation is available here.)The conversation was wide-roving: at turns, intimate and candid, funny and incisive, moving and brutally honest, and consistently reflective and mindful of the under-acknowledged import of Black critical voices and the role that they play in challenging the racism at the foundations of cultural institutions, and the taste-making power those institutions continue to wield.We started by affirming simple truths: that Black critics have been setting the record straight and engaging Black citizenry “in the making of its own story,” as Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang wrote in 2019, across the centuries, from Frederick Douglass’s sharp observations about blackface minstrelsy to the barrier-breaking journalism of theater and music columnists like Pauline Hopkins, Sylvester Russell and Lester Walton in the late 19th and early 20th century. The long Harlem Renaissance gave us figures like Nora Holt, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. And Amiri Baraka and Phyl Garland wed Black nationalist desire with fierce, experimental music criticism in the Black Arts era.Their work helped lead an intellectual revolution in writing and thinking about the importance of Black sound, but also more broadly showcased the meaning of being an informed, opinionated and passionate listener dedicated to inviting readers into felt and meaningful conversations about the culture that matters to them. Greg Tate carried that tradition forward with a combination of potent love for Black peoples and a swagger fueled by that same deep and unbridled affection. In April, when the annual PopCon holds its 20th anniversary gathering in Brooklyn, it’ll be a second-line lovefest for one of its greatest voices.DAPHNE A. BROOKS Many of us have been thinking for some time about the absolutely crucial role that critics of color, that women critics, that L.G.B.T.Q. critics can and have played in shifting and opening up and challenging the kinds of conversations, the value systems, taste-making, and gatekeeping rituals and processes that have long dominated mainstream popular music criticism. If 2020 reminded us of anything, it’s that the struggle for African American autonomy in the American body politic is a multifaceted one tied to necessary and interlocking social, political as well as cultural revolutions in valuing Black life. Culture critics, we know, play a pivotal role in identifying and narrating the dimensions of that value. But in the history of popular music culture across the 20th and 21st centuries, how often have we extensively imagined Black folks as critics, as knowledge producers in relation to their own expressive cultures?GREG TATE I discovered that music critics existed because I was doing research for a comic book I wanted to write back in the early ’70s. I went to the library and got all the books about music that I could find, one of which was Amiri Baraka’s “Black Music.” And after that, I exchanged comic book superheroes for great Black music superheroes, because the way Baraka wrote about Sun Ra, Archie Shepp and Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor elevated them to the level of superheroes to me.The way he was able to bring his poetics into writing about music and left these indelible lines — these things, they’ve formed my own critical perspective, my own critical understanding of the way in which the opportunity to talk about the music is of course the opportunity to bring our whole lives to who we are. And it’s also the reason that most of us who were writing in the ’80s and ’90s really became, or were, multidisciplinary artists. We never thought that criticism was the be all and end all of what we had to offer.Between I’d say 1977 and 2000, there was a community of Black writers in New York: The Voice first, but then The Source and then Vibe. So all of us come into the game thinking of Black criticism is something we do as a gang. And because you had the near instant gratification of response from the community, you knew what you were writing was having impact. With The Voice, if it came out on Wednesday, you knew by Saturday what people were thinking of it.WESLEY MORRIS At some point I figured out that there were definitely some gaps in terms of who was speaking and who was writing about what. I would spend hours on end watching BET, VH1 and MTV, and you start to see that there are people being put in boxes by these programmers. I mean Joan Armatrading? She was never on MTV. I could see that there were things that needed to be addressed, or redressed, in terms of who was being acknowledged, whose existences were being acknowledged. There are Black women who’ve made music that changed my life that have never received a review in any magazines. The thoroughest description I got was Vibe, when it showed up. Because I had been waiting for that. I had been waiting for people to acknowledge that there was some merit to this music.I’ve noticed in the last 10 years, say, but it’s probably even older than that, that there is a real reluctance to seriously engage with the work and the craft of the work and what pop music is doing, what it sounds like. I don’t know if that’s a fear of getting it wrong. I don’t know if that’s a fear of what Twitter might do to you if you do get it wrong. This is related to a question of ethics, which is what is falling in that lacuna between greatness and crap that only criticism can both explicate and reify in some way. To me, it feels like a crisis that nobody’s really acknowledging, but I think that’s because there still aren’t enough Black people to pick that work up and do something.DANYEL SMITH Listen, it’s the criticism that’s missing in action without question. I am consistently, constantly in a mild panic about the music that has been created over the last 15 to 20 years that has not been listened to like it’s real music. I am concerned about artists like Cardi B and Drake, who are literally the biggest stars in the entire world, and their music is not talked about with a lot of seriousness. Comparing it to what happened in the past, comparing it to what could happen in the future, the context of when it came out to when it didn’t. Again, as an editor, I say, what about the knowing, deeply reported stories and the profiles that are not being written? The columns?It has to do, I think with there being a generation of Black writers who have not really ever worked with Black editors. And I think, flawed as we were, at Vibe, XXL, The Source, Essence — there were hip-hop magazines all over — there has not been enough of “I’m a Black editor that knows a lot; and I’m a Black writer that wants to know more.” I don’t know where they’re happening. Not nearly enough, anyway.TATE Well, I’ll first say, and this is in response to Wesley: Internet killed the Black music journalist star or the Black music star publication. But that was a different world we existed in just in terms of the power that labels had, right? If you wanted your music, you had to get it in a CD form from a major label. So the work we did as independent writers, and as “Blacketty-Black” as we were in the writing, it was very much tied to the commercial life of those publications: the ads The Voice got, Vibe got, Source got from labels. So on just a base level, what we were doing was glorified consumer reporting. That’s why those voices mattered, but what also happened around 2000 and in the arts was that the published pool of writers on hip-hop shifted more from Black to white. Why? Most of our colleagues by that time had just moved out of doing music journalism at all. People grew up, they had marriages, they had kids, kids needed to be fed and properly clothed and sent to the right school. And hip-hop at that point blew up in the suburbs in a major way. But the thing was that notion of Black writing being essential to one’s understanding of the culture, where the culture was no longer the culture as we’d known it in ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.BROOKS: But let’s be real, right. We know historically that jazz and blues criticism has been the domain of white men.TATE Yeah and certainly, that’s the radical transformation that hip-hop criticism offers. It was the first time in the history of the music that Black writers were writing about it authoritatively as it was being created.THULANI DAVIS But I want to say there, you all are talking out of a wealth of information …. This is the moment to teach young people that they’re in a continuum, because I don’t know that they’re aware of that. The one thing about the ’60s and the ’70s was everybody got some education about what happened before them and what the continuum was like. This is a particularly good time to ask, “What is it that the critic needs to know?” Because any critic of anything needs to know something more than the last 25 years of their lives. They need to know everything you all have been talking about.I think also there’s this idea that everybody has a platform, everybody can be a platform …. I do think people have to think about working together, because one of the things about the culture right now, it’s one star at a time. The collective conversation would be useful. We need to keep asking how do we push awareness, taste, interesting writing styles? How do we push forward? I think it can’t be one at a time. I don’t think that’ll work in the way that information is disseminated now.TATE I just want to paraphrase Baldwin: “Ours is a story that must be told again and again and again, because the erasure goes on as the culture is emerging.” You can’t reboot the institutional access that we had in that particular moment because of how incendiary the culture was in that period. People were coming up with new paradigms for what hip-hop or rap was every week, it changed. There was just an understanding that there needed to be writers who were on the ground, who got it, who lived it, embodied it at a certain level.We haven’t even tracked the kind of self-making, cultural transformation of the landscape that got affected by all this writing, by these gangs of folks being at these institutions at that particular time. The conversation about hip-hop that is still sustained is the one that we created in the ’80s and ’90s. And it extended, of course, to what was happening in Black academia, what was happening in Black film.BROOKS So it means that at the point in which we’re writing about popular music, for instance, we’re asking questions that start with, “What are the conditions that created this music in the first place?” We need to start at that level. We need to start at 1619 before we can actually get to the place of critics being able to dissect and write really beautifully about the richness, the depth, the urgency and complexity of what our music is, why we made it, what it means to us. It’s a 400-year story. More

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      Greg Tate, Influential Critic of Black Culture, Dies at 64

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      His writing for The Village Voice and other publications helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same planes as jazz and Abstract Expressionism.Greg Tate, a journalist and critic whose articles for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and other publications starting in the 1980s helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same plane as jazz and Abstract Expressionism, died on Tuesday in New York City. He was 64.His daughter, Chinara Tate, confirmed the death. No cause was given.Mr. Tate exploded onto the New York cultural scene in the early 1980s, soon after graduating from Howard University, when he began contributing freelance music reviews to The Voice. Although he didn’t join the weekly newspaper’s staff until 1987, he almost immediately became its pre-eminent writer on Black music and art, and by extension one of the city’s leading cultural critics.New York at the time was an ebullient chaos of cultures, its downtown scene populated by street artists, struggling writers, disco D.J.s and punk rockers living in cheap apartments and crowding into clubs like Paradise Garage and CBGB. The Village Voice was their bible, and Mr. Tate was very often their guide.His tastes varied widely, as did his style; his whirlwind sentences might string together pop culture, French literary theory and the latest slang. He was equally at home discussing Chuck D or assessing the latest work of the theorist Edward Said, all deployed with a casual candor that left readers wanting more.He quickly graduated from reviews to cultural criticism. Among his most famous articles was “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke,” an incisive attempt, published in The Voice in 1986, to find a middle ground between the austere aesthetics of Black nationalist intellectualism and the emancipatory pandemonium of artists like James Brown.Mr. Tate could be both generous and exacting: He praised Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as one of the best albums ever made but called the follow-up, “Bad,” one of the worst. He eviscerated Jackson’s “blanched skin and disfigured African features” as the sad, inevitable result of white America’s ongoing appropriation of Black culture.“Jackson was the under-weaned creation of two Black working-class traditions,” Mr. Tate wrote in The Voice in 1987: “That of boys being forced to bypass childhood along the fast track to manhood, and that of rhythm and blues auctioning off the race’s passion for song, dance, sex and spectacle.”But he was less interested in castigation than in celebration and exploration. A single, clear thread ran through all his work: a belief that Black culture was fresh and innovative but at the same time deeply rooted in history, and that its disparate forms could be understood as emanations from a common heritage.“I marvel at hip-hop for the same reasons I marvel at Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X and Michael Jordan: a lust for that wanton and wily thing called swing and an ardor for Black artists who make virtuosic use of African-American vernacular,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1994.Mr. Tate’s first book catalyzed a generation of young writers of color with its vivid language, easy erudition and kaleidoscopic range.Mr. Tate’s first book, “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America,” was published in 1993. A compendium of his articles from The Voice, it catalyzed a generation of young writers of color with its vivid language, easy erudition and kaleidoscopic range.“His best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon,” one of those young critics, Hua Hsu, wrote in 2016 in The New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer. “They were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn’t have got along but did.”Some critics like to remain aloof from their subjects; not Mr. Tate. He palled around with the rapper Fab Five Freddy and the guitarist Vernon Reid, a founder of the band Living Colour, and he went out of his way to promote rising young Black artists, especially women.After a series of meetings in 1985 to discuss the racial disparities in New York’s music scene, he joined Mr. Reid and several others to form the Black Rock Coalition, which promotes Black musicians. Mr. Tate wrote the group’s manifesto.“Rock and roll,” he wrote, “like practically every form of popular music across the globe, is Black music, and we are its heirs. We, too, claim the right of creative freedom and access to American and International airwaves, audiences, markets, resources and compensations, irrespective of genre.”He wrote as both a music fan and a musician; he played guitar, and in 1999 he formed Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, a genre-blending band of indeterminate size. Anywhere from 12 to 40 members might be onstage at a time, with Mr. Tate often playing the role of conductor.He left The Voice in 2005, became a visiting professor at Brown and Columbia and wrote a series of books, including a sequel to “Flyboy” and a critical assessment of Jimi Hendrix. Both the pace and the style of his writing slowed down and became more deliberate as he shifted his attention to visual art and national politics.“When you’re younger, it’s all about expressionism, it’s all about trying to make as much noise as possible,” he told The L.A. Review of Books in 2018. “You realize, after a while, your thoughts are incendiary enough; the language doesn’t have to also be on fire all the time.”Mr. Tate in 2014. After he left The Village Voice in 2005, both the pace and the style of his writing slowed down and became more deliberate.Alan NahigianGregory Stephen Tate was born on Oct. 14, 1957, in Dayton, Ohio. Both his parents, Charles and Florence (Grinner) Tate, were active in the city’s civil rights movement as members of the Congress of Racial Equality, and their home served as a gathering place for fellow organizers.On weekends, as the family cleaned the house, his father would play jazz albums and his mother would play recordings of speeches by Malcolm X, followed by Nina Simone.Mr. Tate’s omnivorous nature emerged early on. His family moved to Washington when he was 13, and among their new friends was the playwright and poet Thulani Davis. In an interview, she remembered Greg coming to her apartment to listen to records and grilling her about music, art and literature. He read Amiri Baraka and Rolling Stone in equal measure.“When he discovered a new sound or set of ideas,” Ms. Davis said, “he would listen to or read them obsessively.”In addition to his daughter, Mr. Tate is survived by a brother, Brian; a sister, Geri Augusto; and a grandson, Nile.He studied journalism and film at Howard, where he also hosted a radio show and began trying his hand at music criticism. Eventually Ms. Davis recommended that he submit something to The Village Voice, whose music editor, Robert Christgau, she knew.Just before moving to New York permanently, Mr. Tate struck up a friendship with Arthur Jafa, another Howard student, who was at the beginning of his own illustrious career as a video artist. A chance encounter outside the Howard library, just before Mr. Tate moved to Harlem, turned into an eight-hour conversation, ranging over Greek drama, avant-garde film and the latest sounds coming out of New York.The two remained close, bouncing ideas off each other and becoming famous for their public gab sessions. When Mr. Jafa needed an essay for an exhibition catalog, Mr. Tate wrote it in a night. On another occasion, Mr. Jafa joined Mr. Tate for an event in Minneapolis, where they ended up talking for 10 hours, becoming a sort of accidental performance art.“He didn’t accept false boundaries,” Mr. Jafa said in an interview. “It’s hard to describe what it’s like having the voice of a generation as your friend.” More

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      The Peerless Imagination of Greg Tate

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      For four decades, he set the critical standard for elegantly intricate assessments of music, art, literature and more, writing dynamically about the resilience and paradoxes of Black creativity and life.There are sentences, and then there are the writings of Greg Tate, who died on Tuesday at the age of 64. A critic and historian of music, art and so much more for over four decades, he was a singular voice, a fount of bravura essays on the fantastical creativity, determined resilience and wry paradoxes of Black creativity and life.His writing froze and shattered time, supercharged neurons, unraveled familiar knots and tied up beautiful new ones. It contained uncanny, elevated descriptions of sound and performance, offered grounded philosophical inquisitions and sprinkled in wink-nudge personal asides. It could have the cadence of smack talk, or a conspiratorial whisper. And it was patient, unfurling at exactly the pace of gestation, while somehow containing turns of phrase that appeared to be moving at warp speed.It doesn’t matter which page you open to in his crucial 1992 anthology “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America” — just open it. Eruptions of style — of pure intellectual vigor and unhurried swagger — are everywhere.Page 123, leading into a review of Public Enemy: “Granted, Charlie Parker died laughing. Choked chicken wing perched over ’50s MTV. So? No way in hell did Bird, believing there was no competition in music, will his legacy to some second-generation be-boppers to rattle over the heads of the hip-hop nation like a rusty sabre.”Page 221, on Don DeLillo: “DeLillo’s books are inward surveys of the white supremacist soul — on the run from mounting evidence that its days are (as the latest in Black militant button-wear loves to inform us) numbered.”“When you’re younger, it’s all about expressionism, it’s all about trying to make as much noise as possible,” Tate said in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018. “I was trying to literally approximate music on the page.”To read Tate was to be awed by a gift that verged on the extraterrestrial. But he was as meaningful and influential for the words he wrote as for the possibilities he made room for. Aspiring critics, this one included, understood: You almost certainly could not do what Tate did, but what a revelation nonetheless to learn about all the available space between the ground where mortals pecked away at keys and wherever he resided. There were whole galaxies of possibility to explore, so many fertile places you might land.Fearless isn’t exactly the word for how Tate approached his subjects — that would imply that to honor one’s own intellectual truth was in some way contingent on, or mindful of, the acquiescence of others. Maybe boundless is better. He rightly understood that the scope of criticism extended far beyond the borders of the subject work. The subject was the pretext, the intro, the foyer to a whole house.Tate began writing in the late 1970s, and began contributing in The Village Voice in 1981. He moved to New York from Washington, D.C., soon after, and sought out the city’s creative spasms: jazz, art, literature, newly emergent hip-hop.In that era, the alt-weekly was the medium most comfortable publishing writing with high stakes, open ears, indelible flair, infinite possibility. And in that ecosystem, Tate was the lodestar. Take “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke,” a visionary essay which appeared in The Voice in 1986 that called for a “popular poststructuralism — accessible writing bent on deconstructing the whole of Black culture.” It was a call to critical arms to rise to the “postnationalist” output of the time — in short, Tate wanted peers as ambitious and wild-minded as the culture he was covering..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}When he loved something, he was bracing. On Miles Davis: “‘Bitches Brew’ is an orchestral marvel because it fuses James Brown’s antiphonal riffing against a metaphoric bass drone with Sly’s minimalist polyrhythmic melodies and Jimi’s concept of painting pictures with ordered successions of electronic sounds.”When he was frustrated by something, he was bracing. In a roasting of Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” and in a way, of Jackson himself: “Jackson’s decolorized flesh reads as the buppy version of Dorian Gray, a blaxploitation nightmare that offers this moral: Stop, the face you save may be your own.” (When Jackson died, in 2009, Tate’s memorial tribute loudly affirmed Jackson’s place in the soul pantheon while still agonizing over the personal choices Jackson made, especially in his later years.)And he planted flags early. Critics before Tate had written about rap music, of course, but his early pieces on Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, De La Soul and others stand as the definitive critical engagements of their day. They also made the case not just for a hip-hop canon but for hip-hop as canon.Not long after “Flyboy” came out in 1992, Tate brought his pen to Vibe magazine, which in its infancy was underpinned by a downtown New York cosmohemian sensibility that he helped shape with his mere presence.His column, “Black-Owned,” was a staple and a megaphone trumpeting the most progressive creators across disciplines. In the October 1993 issue, one of the magazine’s first, he wrote a dynamic full-page poem called “What Is Hip-Hop?”: “Hip-hop is inverse capitalism/Hip-hop is reverse colonialism.”In 1995, he sat with Richard Pryor: “You literally have to go to Shakespeare, James Joyce, or James Baldwin to find readings of human folly as incisive as Pryor’s. Yet Pryor has it one up on those masters of the word: He didn’t need exclamation points — his body movement was his punctuation.”On D’Angelo’s “Voodoo,” in 1999: “There are times when the music on this disc sounds so raw, so naked and exposed, you’ll be tempted to throw a blanket over its brittle, shivering bones.” On TV on the Radio, in 2006: “Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe has a wandering tenor wail that seems undecided between Catholicism’s four-part chorales, doo-wop’s street-corner symphonies and New Wave’s girly-man blues.”Full disclosure — I assigned the TV on the Radio review, one of my first decisions when I joined the magazine as music editor. The opportunity to bring Tate back into those pages was a gift. (He also was a relentless mentor and connector — he introduced me to one of the first people I hired there.) By that point, Tate’s sui generis brilliance was widely acknowledged in our circles, and still barely touched by others. Showcasing his critical pirouetting was meant to serve as a beacon, and also a simple acknowledgment of the way he affected every writer I cared about and learned from — we’re all Tate’s children. I still buy “Flyboy” every time I see it in a bookstore. I never want to be too far away from it, lest I forget how vast the cosmos is. More