Writer was champion, critic of hip-hop music and culture

Greg Tate, a musician and longtime Village Voice writer who chronicled Black achievement in the arts and was acclaimed as a preeminent critic of hip-hop music and culture, died Dec. 7 in New York City at 64.

The death was confirmed by Laura Sell, a publicist for his publisher, Duke University Press. The cause was not dislcosed.

Mr. Tate, who spent a formative decade in Washington before moving to New York in the early 1980s, was a guitarist who performed in groups including the Black Rock Coalition and Burnt Sugar until shortly before his death.

But he was better known as a journalist whose wide-ranging critical essays and interviews, primarily about Black music, filmmaking and art, attracted an ardent following. In 1987, he joined the staff of the Village Voice, then a culturally influential weekly newspaper, and showed a vibrant flair for language, allusion and broad-reaching observations on culture.

"I am a modified Africancentric, postmodern critic, I guess you could say," Mr. Tate told the Washington Times in 1992. "I am concerned about how black people express their humanity in the world, whether it be on the campus, on the page, or physically. I try to use whatever tools are critically available to me to try to understand that humanity."

His 1992 essay collection, "Flyboy in the Buttermilk," and its 2016 sequel, "Flyboy 2," have been seminal influences on a generation of cultural critics. Journalist and jazz writer Adam Shatz wrote in a tweet that Mr. Tate was "to avant-Black music what Clement Greenberg was to Abstract Expressionism, a pioneering critic, canon-builder, curator, astronaut-explorer of planets unknown to most of his peers."

Mr. Tate could range in a single essay from Louis Armstrong to Ice Cube to French theorist Jean Baudrillard to Picasso and blues singer Bessie Smith without sounding pretentious, while writing in an earthy, uncensored, rapid-fire style that was equal parts intellectual rigor and soles-on-the-pavement street cred.

"I was trying to literally approximate music on the page," he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books. "It's all about the sound and the fury. And, because I was writing for The Voice, I was encouraged to be as loud and critical and vulgar as possible. To just be explosive."

His 1986 essay, "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke," has been seen as a manifesto calling for a framework of magazines and artistic organizations built around a Black aesthetic, independent of and not subservient to any White cultural norms.

Mr. Tate was deeply immersed in jazz and wrote with authority on such performers as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter, but he focused on the present and future of Black music, not its past.

"When it comes to music, Black America generally tends not to be impressed by the good old days," he wrote in an essay in "Flyboy 2." "This is why in our music … the tradition is innovation, not nostalgia."

Mr. Tate was among the first writers to treat hip-hop music as a serious - even poetic - form of musical expression, which he considered an extension of an African American musical tradition reaching back through soul music to jazz and the blues.

"Aging pontificators forget that hiphop is the flipside of being young, black, and urban-situated: the fun side, the funkyfresh side," Mr. Tate wrote in a 1988 essay, "Hiphop Nation: It's Like This Y'all." "Take out rap and one could go crying for a belly laugh in modern black pop. If drum sound is this music's heartthrob, humor is its blood vessels."

People who dismissed the group Public Enemy and its frontman, Chuck D, "because he's loud, pro-black, and proud will likely miss out on gifts for blues pathos and black comedy," Mr. Tate wrote in 1988. "When he's on, his rhymes can stun-gun your heart and militarize your funnybone."

But Mr. Tate, who often championed female artists in his writing, was unflinching when confronting the misogyny, homophobia and antisemitism in some of Public Enemy's lyrics.

"Since PE show sound reasoning when they focus on racism as a tool of the U.S. power structure," he wrote, "they should be intelligent enough to realize that dehumanizing gays, women, and Jews isn't going to set black people free."

When reviewing the career of a different Black entertainer, Michael Jackson, Mr. Tate was not afraid to address a nagging question about the performer's identity:

"The absolute irony of all the jokes and speculation about Michael trying to turn into a European woman is that after James Brown, his music (and his dancing) represent the epitome - one of the mightiest peaks - of what we call Black Music. Fortunately for us, that suspect skin-lightening disease … had no effect on the field-holler screams palpable in his voice, or the electromagnetism fueling his elegant and preternatural sense of rhythm, flexibility, and fluid motion."

Gregory Stephen Tate was born Oct. 14, 1957, in Dayton, Ohio. He moved with his family to Washington when he was 13. His mother, Florence, was a spokeswoman for D.C. Mayor Marion Barry and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. His father, Charles, was a foundation executive.

Mr. Tate studied at Howard University and wrote for the Black Arts Review in Washington before moving to New York.

His survivors include a daughter from an early relationship; a brother; a sister; and a grandson.

Mr. Tate was influenced in equal parts by Rolling Stone magazine - for which he later wrote - and by poet and critic Amiri Baraka, the author of "Black Music." Mr. Tate later criticized Baraka's increasing militancy as a leading figure in the Black Nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

"If being black meant nothing but being oppressed by white people, black liberation would have no meaning," Mr. Tate wrote in 1986. "Like if white people weren't around to be mad at, people into being black would be out of a job."

In 2003, Mr. Tate published "Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience," exploring African American ambivalence toward the guitarist-singer. The same year, he edited, "Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture."

As a musician with Burnt Sugar and the Black Rock Coalition, Mr. Tate sometimes reversed the mirror of cultural influence by taking the music of White performers, such as David Bowie and Steely Dan, and reflecting it through a Black musical prism.

Mr. Tate left the Village Voice in 2005 and contributed in recent years to publications including ArtNews, curated art exhibitions and taught at several colleges. A final book, about James Brown, is scheduled to publish next year.

In a searching 1991 essay, Mr. Tate addressed the imbalance between male and female perspectives of Black experience.

"If Black male leadership doesn't move in the direction of recognizing the pain and trauma beneath the rage," he wrote, "as the work of Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, bell hooks and other women writers have done, if we don't exercise our capacity to love and heal each other by digging deep into our mutual woundedness, then what we're struggling for is merely the end of white supremacy - and not the salvaging of its victims."

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