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GREG TATE LIVES: VIBE Honors The GOAT Of Hip-Hop Journalism On His 65th Birthday

A foundational soul source of our writing world remembered greatly by his peers.

OCTOBER 14, 2022 4:31PM

BY ROB KENNER

Today would be, should be, Greg Tate’s 65th solar return.

For much of the original VIBE tribe, the physical transition of this unstoppable cultural force, whose work continues to inspire generations of artists and activists, still feels unreal. One minute he was plucking his mbira amidst the overflowing bookshelves in his Harlem headquarters; the next his name was splashed across the marquee of the World-Famous Apollo Theater, taking his rightful place amidst a pantheon of Black geniuses memorialized there—Aretha Franklin, Prince, and James Brown, the subject of Tate’s next book.

You remember Greg Tate. Founder of the Black Rock Coalition, along with assorted arkestras and Afrocentric artistic alliances. Author of the seminal Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, acquired by the pioneering Black book editor Malaika Adero and published exactly thirty years ago in 1992.


That same year Tate wrote the very first page of the very first issue of VIBE magazine, published in September, three months before The Chronic. Conceived while the wreckage of the L.A. Uprising was still smoldering, Tate’s incendiary 500-word essay “The Sound and The Fury” singed the synapses, challenging anyone who dared read it.

“A lifetime of Tarzan and John Wayne teaches us that when the war drums fall silent, the pink man should really begin to know fear,” read the first line. As a pink man myself, Tate had my full and undivided attention from that moment forward, but his essay was not primarily directed at me. Tate’s work was a cathartic rallying cry to Black creatives, a challenge to hip-hop, a critique of capitalism that ran opposite a full-page Gap ad featuring Queen Latifah’s beatific smile. “Conventional wisdom would have us believe that hip-hop predicted all but the day and time of the Los Angeles rebellion,” Tate wrote. “But what if hip-hop is not the expression of Black folks’ rage, but only another momentary containment of it, or worse, an entertaining displacement?”

Tate’s fearless truth-telling never failed. His brilliance was VIBE’s North Star, an inspiration and firmament for most of the scribes who made this magazine matter—starting with staff writers Joan Morgan, Kevin Powell, and Scott Poulson-Bryant, the first journalist to profile Puff Daddy and the man who came up with VIBE’s name, now a professor at the University of Michigan.

“An artist without an art becomes a danger to herself,” said Dr. Joan Morgan, Ph.D, during a four-hour Tate memorial convened via Zoom last December. A Yoruba priestess who both coined and embodies the term “hip hop feminist,” Morgan now serves as Program Director at the Center for Black Visual Cultural at NYU’s Institute for African-American Affairs. “I literally would not be a writer if it was not for him,” she said.


“It feels like Washington Square Park is gone,” remarked award-winning playwright Eisa Davis during the same memorial. “Something so essential to New York is gone.”


“In some ways the loss has been impossible to process,” concurred Morgan. “I felt like, ‘Did Greg really leave and take my words away?’ Because I can’t even put sentences together.”

The first person I contacted when I heard the news of Tate’s passing was Kevin Powell, who wrote numerous legendary cover stories during his long run at VIBE. Before joining the magazine’s startup team, Kevin appeared on the first season of MTV’s The Real World, where he could be seen clutching a well-worn copy of Flyboy in the Buttermilk during heated arguments about racism and white privilege with fellow cast members.

“His words were hypnotic, and they lit my brain like a fuse,” wrote Kevin—now a well-known activist and author of 15 books of his own—in his tribute to Tate for The Washington Post. “Because Greg Tate was brave, free, and unapologetically Black. Because Greg was hip, hip-hop, and a hippie; and Greg was American-made in every sense of the phrase, like his artistic heroes Miles Davis and Amiri Barka.”


A quick Google search will attest to the fact that the Tate tribute has become a literary subgenre unto itself. Essays extolling his brilliance began appearing as early as 2007—shout out Tate’s friend and kindred spirit Michael A. Gonzales for being one of the first to give Greg his proverbial flowers.

As the prolific cultural critic observed on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Tate birthed a nation as mighty as the one tasked with holding Public Enemy back. “For better or worse, if it were not for Greg Tate there would be no Bönz Malone, Harry Allen, Joan Morgan, kris ex, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Touré, Danyel Smith, Michael Eric Dyson, Karen R. Good, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Smokey Fontaine, Jon Caramanica, Jeff Chang, Amy Linden, Tom Terrell, Mark Anthony Neal, Tricia Rose, Sacha Jenkins, DJ Spooky, dream hampton, Miles Marshall Lewis, Aliya S. King, SekouWrites, Kenji Jasper, Oliver Wang, Cheo Hodari Coker, Keith Murphy or myself.”

All this came as something of a surprise to kris ex, who commented under Gonzales’s post that he did not actually consider himself any sort of Tate disciple. “I never studied Greg’s work like that,” ex tweeted after Tate’s passing. “But I just read one sentence of his that contained three ideas that I sure as hell jacked from whoever jacked it from him.”

Similarly Bönz Malone had not met Tate before they connected via VIBE. “I loved him,” Bönz told me. “I used to talk to him whenever I saw him or had a chance to. I never ignored his greatness or the opportunity to learn from his example. Just his calm or should I say controlled demeanor was like strong iced Black coffee. He expressed things that I wasn’t concerned with at the time, but I respected him for using his time to express his concern, even about things that he had strong opinions about with pinpoint accuracy of thought.”


“I was one of the young writers who called myself a ‘Tater Tot,’,” wrote former VIBE editor Elizabeth Mendez-Berry, now VP/Executive Editor at OneWorld Books, and cofounder of the Critical Minded Community. “Not because I could ever grow up to be him, but because he showed me the way to be vivaciously, enthusiastically, precisely myself. In this moment as I read others’ experiences with him and his work it occurs to me that there are many, many more tater tots than I realized—that his fingerprints are everywhere, indelible. His forever gift to us all.”

Tate’s column Black Owned—named for the signs hung on Black-owned businesses during the L.A. uprising in much the same way Moses commanded the children of Israel to put blood on their doorframes to spare them from judgment—became a space to celebrate artists flying under the radar of mainstream media, like his former bandmate Meshell Ndegeocello and the poet and publisher Jessica Care Moore. “He called my poems ‘a Black scream,’” Moore recalled during Tate’s memorial. “He told me to ‘Scare Moore.’ If Greg Tate was on my team I could do what the fuck I wanted in New York City.”


Many mistakenly assume that Tate’s 1988 Village Voice piece “Nobody Love a Genius Child: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk”—a riff on a James Baldwin essay that birthed the title of Tate’s first book, was all about paying tribute to the recently deceased painter. While it remains the most insightful assessment of Basquiat’s artistry ever published (at a time when “serious” art critics were pissing on SAMO’s grave), Tate’s work is also a brutally honest meditation on the “circumscribed avenues for recognition and reward available for Black artists and intellectuals working in the avant-garde tradition of the West.” The only solution was to build a movement, which is exactly what Tate set about doing.


(Instagram Post)

syreetagates

I’m an over thinker. The things that REALLY matter I obsessssssssssssssssssss over. So I’ve been sitting on this for a min.🥺

But in true fashion Tate had (always has) the words. 📝

“LOVE AND THE ENEMY.” 1991. THE VILLAGE VOICE

“i realized that the meaning of being black is summed up in who comes to bury you, who gathers together in your name after you’ve gone, what they have to say about how you LOVED, and how you were LOVED in return”.

And Unk you are loved always and forever. Happy Bday Ironman

We 🎁

⏭️⏭️ GregTateWasLoved.com ⏮️⏮️

A Living Archive 🛸🕋🚀

🖼️ by @donisdope 🤝🏾 appreciate your diligence 💯

#ArchivingIsAStatementOfValue
#TheGatesPreserve
#GregTate



“My mission is clear,” he wrote as early as 1986, “The future of Black culture depends that this generation brings forth a worldly-wise and stoopid fresh intelligentsia of radical pups who can get as ignant as James Brown with their Wangs”— FYI Wang used to be a brand of computer—“and stay in the Black. Give me such an army and we’ll be talking total cultural Black rule by the time the eco-system collapses, SDI bottoms out Fort Knox, the Aryan Brotherhood is officially in the White House, and Wall Street is on the moon.” (Which pretty much foretold the present moment in American history, three decades in advance.)


“Tate could comprehend the entire expanse of the universe,” says cultural critic Rob Marriott, who first encountered Tate through his work before getting the chance to meet him as a high school intern at The Village Voice. “He just made it real, writing and thinking about music, and critiquing it and all that. Truly, truly my mentor.” Marriott would go on to write indelible features for VIBE, chronicling the phenomenal runs of hip hop empires like Death Row and No Limit. “I was a big fan of Albert Murray but he stayed strictly within the blues and jazz form, and didn’t have the bandwidth for hip hop. Greg could talk with authority on Hendrix and hip hop and reggae and R&B and funk… And know how all of those nodes connected. We had never really seen it like that before.”


“Why settle for right now,” Tate asked, “when you can have eternity?” He was good for questions like that. This one he asked in the edition of “Black Owned” published in the February 1997 issue of VIBE—that would be the Black History Month edition, which made it even more utterly Tatesque that he chose to focus that particular column on Joni Mitchell. “She’s got more African-American fans than maybe even she realizes,” he pointed out. “And has been a major influence on Black artists as diverse as Cassadnra Wilson, Seal, and the Glyph Formerly Known as Prince.”

Being a Tate essay, the column could never be about one person, place, or thing. Tate’s mind was too eclectic, too electric, sparking at the speed of light and sound, spanning art forms and eras in unexpected, illuminating ways. Along the way to giving Joni her flowers Greg scattered Gazania petals upon the likes of Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Carlos Santana, Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, John Coltrane, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, George Clinton, Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin, Wayne Shorter, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, and De La Soul.

Tate’s larger point about Joni was that she never lied—in the sense that she always “put aesthetic development ahead of clocking loochie.” The article came out seven months before Janet Jackson and Q-Tip and Dilla put together that “Got Til’ It’s Gone” joint with the Joni Mitchell sample. Tate was good for that too, staying miles ahead, and bringing us with him, if we did our best to keep up.


Sentences like “If I was a young hip hop artist hoping to remain creatively fertile by the time I hit 30…” abound in Tate’s work for VIBE. “What might be missing in hip hop is artistic models for mugs to draw strength from whenever they want to change their pitch up and smack they bitch-ass, afraid-of-evolving selves up. We’re going to attempt to remedy that situation.” That attempt was the true purpose of this column—of all Tate’s work as VIBE Writer-at-Large: to challenge readers and fellow travelers to be better, to aim higher, to aspire.

“He wasn’t a traditional mentor,” recalls Cheo Hodari Coker, the hip hop journalist turned Hollywood screenwriter responsible for hit movies like Notorious and the Netflix series Luke Cage. “It wasn’t like you were gonna go to Dagobah and Yoda was gonna make you a Jedi. You know what I’m sayin’? He was approachable and cool and if he respected your writing he would give you insight, and as much conversation as you wanted. He had strong opinions that he articulated, but he wasn’t laying down laws. He was just too mellow and too cool for that. But he would throw in these references and he would never explain the reference. He would just say it, and then if it spoke to you or you were curious, then it was up to you to do the homework to figure out exactly what he was talking about.”



“Greg was a teacher without trying to wear that shit on his T-Shirt,” recalls Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, the showrunner and writer of the TV series Washington Black who met Tate at The Village Voice. “You just got it in where you got it in. So it was like, you know, catch him in the hallway. I was just on a mission in general as a kid to soak up all this shit, and Greg was that pinnacle for me. Every opportunity I had—sittin’ on Astor Place, sittin’ on Cooper Square, talk music, talk writing. He was just so generous with his time.”

I never felt like ‘I’m the kid learning how to do this.’ When I wrote a piece, Greg would probably be one of the first people to be like ‘Yo, that shit is dope.’ And getting that kind of affirmation at that age does no small part in kinda like cementing you on your course. Just becoming a professional writer—I’m not sayin’ it was all due to Greg. But just seeing somebody who looks like you, just seeing a Black man being able to carve out a space that was so distinctive. There’s no underplaying the psychic significance of that.”

VIBE editor Karen R. Good first read Tate while she was a student at Howard University, also his alma mater, and saw him speak at Howard’s first Hip Hop Conference. So when she was asked to edit his work she froze up. “I was an assistant editor under Danyel Smith, and Greg had written a short record review,” she recalls. “One of my first assignments was to do the first edit of this review. And I remember going to Danyel like, ‘Greg Tate wrote this!’ And she was like, ‘Yeah.’ And I said ‘What am I supposed to do with this? You want me to edit Greg Tate? I bugged out. I panicked.” The VIBE music editor who would become editor in chief and go on to become an acclaimed author, Danyel Smith, told her to relax and assured her that Tate would be cool. “Don’t even worry about it,” she told Good. “Every writer needs an editor.” Over time Karen had the opportunity to spend time with writers she admired like Tate and dream hampton. “They would be talking, and half the time I wouldn’t know what the fuck they was talkin’ about. I just didn’t know! I couldn’t keep up! It happened time and time again. But I never left a conversation with him without getting hip to something. And when I wrote something good he would also let me know, and maybe tip me off about a book I needed to check out. ‘You know, you gotta read Black Music, cause the emotion is the devotion.”

Most of all the young editor—now an acclaimed author in her own right appreciates the validation from a writer she considered a legend. “Here’s this guy with these super kind eyes,” she recalls. “I love him most for seeing me in the way. He saw me better than I saw myself.” It’s a beautiful thing to give somebody a belief in themselves. Because he was such a giant, but unassuming. Like he’s just in his ascots and colors and jaunty caps. Just bein’ Greg.”


My own introduction to Tate—and the wave of writers and artists who revolved around him like a literary solar system—came in 1992 when I began working with VIBE. That very first issue featured a cover story on Treach of Naughty By Nature written by Kevin Powell, as well as my own feature story on Super Cat, the dancehall Don Dada. A year later was green lit, Quincy Jones’ audacious vision became a reality, and I embarked upon the adventure of lifetime, spending the next 17 years of my life as a VIBE editor. Like Karen Good I was humbled at the prospect of editing Tate’s prose—and marveled at how easygoing this literary genius could be.


He never pitched a big feature—preferring to use his platform to advocate for up-and-coming and overlooked talents. The editors always brought the big feature ideas to him, and he always took those ideas to another level. I was pleased to read his 2018 interview with The L.A. Review of Books, aptly titled “Fly As Hell,” in which Tate reminisced about his legendary run with this publication. “VIBE is the reason I got to interview Sade, Richard Pryor, Santana, Lenny Kravitz in the Bahamas, Lisa Bonet in Topanga Canyon, Erykah Badu in Fort Greene,” he said. “They’d send you out to Los Angeles for like a week, set you up at some great hotel, you’d go hang out at Richard Pryor’s house or Sade’s hotel room.”

He wrote just one cover story, the aforementioned Badu piece, which ran one month after VIBE’s infamous Toni Braxton in the nude cover as a sort of spiritual cleanse. “Earthy and ethereal, regal and real,” Tate wrote, “Erykah Badu captures what was, what is, and what the world needs now: love, peace, and Baduizm.” Re-reading the intro to that Q&A I can sense Tate “reading” some of VIBE’s editorial decisions with his customary tough love. The only feature he ever complimented me on was a lengthy investigative report about GOD CITY and the rise of white militias. “We need more shit like that,” he told me, decades before the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers’ attempted coup.

When VIBE ceased print publication (the first time) in the summer of 2009, I felt like the floor fell out from under my feet. After a couple of years hustling I landed a job at Complex and one of my first emails went out to the founder of the Black Rock Coalition. Tate even found a way to transform that turgid template of internet publishing, the listicle, into something sublime. He blessed me with a story about Jimi Hendrix’s 12 best guitar solos which was the first thing I read after hearing of Greg’s passing last December. Although it was written literally overnight, Tate wove lines like this: “The solo that leaps out of the triads on ‘Axis’ is Coltrane-worthy, sailing across the heavens in sheer transcendence of this bitter earth. When Hendrix finally achieves escape velocity after the flanged drum break and then goes soaring down a black hole, you’ll wish you had something stronger than a warm Guiness to swoop your ass on up-up-up and away from here too.”

Rock on, Tatus.

Dope read