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Greg Tate, an American music and tradition author and musician, has died, a rep for Tate’s writer Duke College Press confirmed to Selection. He was 64; a explanation for loss of life was not offered.
Whereas his writing touched on many elements of African-American tradition, he’s most likely greatest often called an important early hip-hop author, notably in his a few years on the Village Voice. He was additionally an energetic musician, a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition and the chief of the Burnt Sugar ensemble.
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Born and raised in Ohio, his household moved to Washington, D.C. when he was a young person and he immersed himself within the metropolis’s music tradition of the period; one among his first articles for the Voice was about D.C.’s pivotal, all-black punk quartet the Dangerous Brains. He studied journalism and movie at Howard College in D.C. and moved to New York in 1982, rapidly establishing himself as a music author; he was a co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition three years later.
He was employed on-staff on the Village Voice in 1987 and have become one of many influential publication’s most distinctive and recognized writers, bringing a cerebral edge to his writing about hip-hop that was uncommon on the time and linked the music with the broader tradition; the long-running hip-hop publication The Supply known as him “one of many godfathers of hip-hop journalism.” His 1986 essay “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke” is commonly cited as a milestone in black cultural criticism.
In a 2016 appreciation of Tate within the New Yorker known as “The Critic Who Convinced Me That Criticism Could Be Art,” Hua Hsu wrote: “On the Voice, Tate grew to become recognized for the slangy erudition he dropped at bear on a variety of matters, not simply hip-hop and jazz but in addition science fiction, literary concept, motion pictures, metropolis politics, and police brutality. His greatest paragraphs throbbed like a celebration and chattered like a salon; they have been stylishly jam-packed with names and reference factors that shouldn’t have gotten alongside however did, a trans-everything collision of pop stars, filmmakers, subterranean graffiti artists, Ivory Tower theorists, and Tate’s private buddies, who usually got here throughout because the wisest of the bunch.”
Over time he was revealed in nearly each main music journal in addition to the New York Occasions and the Washington Submit. He remained a Voice contributor till 2005; he additionally wrote a number of books, together with “Every thing However the Burden: What White Folks Are Taking from Black Tradition,” (2003), “Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Expertise” and “Flyboy within the Buttermilk: Essays on Modern America.”
He lectured often and taught programs at Princeton, Brown College and was a Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at Columbia College’s Middle for Jazz Research. (Learn a 2018 interview with him here.)
Within the hours after information of his loss of life unfold, Twitter was full of tributes, primarily from music writers citing his huge affect on the artwork and on them.
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