Greg Tate estate

A “godfather of hip hop journalism” Greg Tate was an immensely influential artist and cultural critic whose tenure at the Village Voice and later the Source shaped the sensibility of a generation of musicians and thinkers. He was the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies in 2009 and a visiting professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. In 2010, he was awarded a United States Artists fellowship.

To call Greg Tate one of the most important critics and essayists of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in any language, would not be an exaggeration. In fact, it would not be enough. He was the genius child everybody loved. He came of age in Chocolate City (what the political class call the nation’s capital), then studied film and journalism at Howard University before settling in New York in the early 1980s to write and make music. Thanks to poet, playwright, librettist, and scholar Thulani Davis, Tate began writing for the Village Voice and almost immediately transformed critical writing on Black culture. He was to the 1980s and ’90s generation what Amiri Baraka and A. B. Spellman (fellow Howard alums) were to that of the 1960s. In 1992 he published Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, a gathering of some of his best writing. The book became an instant classic. He went on to publish Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (2003); edit the landmark anthology Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture (2003); and issue his second collection of essays in 2016, Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader.