“The Black Rock Coalition is shocked, saddened and absolutely devastated with the news that our brother, friend and co-founder Greg Tate made his transition earlier today,” the group said in a statement following Tate’s death. “Greg led the wave of Black writers who, without apology, honored the past yet went full speed ahead into the future, giving dap to Black artists across the cultural spectrum who were not getting love within mainstream circles.
“[W]hen the Brains play hardcore it is with a sense of mission and possession more intense than that of any of the sadomasochistic Anglo poseurs who were their models,” he wrote in a 1982 appreciation of Bad Brains. “And yet, though locked into the form by faith and rebellion, the Brains inject it with as much virtuosic ingenuity as manic devotion.”
Tate’s writings paid tribute, but also took his subjects to task when necessary — even when that meant questioning his literary heroes, like Amiri Baraka. “The beauty as well as the bullshit of Baraka has always been how eloquently he’s managed to confuse his head with the Godhead, his mental problems with the world’s ills, his identity complex with those of all black people,” reads one passage in. And when chronicling the music he loved, he never shied away from feminist critique.
“Part of what’s so valuable about Tate’s role as a cultural critic is the way he negotiates the contradictions that underlie Black American culture,” noted scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in the introduction for. “What Tate understands is that culture, Afro-American culture in particular, is never a matter of either-or.
Throughout his career, he stayed current and remained a passionate advocate and potent critic of the work that moved him. His instantly recognizable style fused Black vernacular with a deep historical savvy and the interdisciplinary spirit of academia. (In 2015,
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