22 July 2026

Fecund, eclectic, and freaky-deke

The African American critic Greg Tate championed black music and culture with all the coolness of his subjects

Every anthology of criticism invites the question: why read a bunch of old reviews? Even the most mediocre examples freeze-frame the obsessions and assumptions of their era before nostalgia or revisionism muddle the picture. But the writers who represent a new breed of criticism and have an enduring literary merit – Pauline Kael on film, Kenneth Tynan on theatre, Clive James on TV – are harder to come by. Flyboy in the Buttermilk, an influential but long-out-of-print 1992 essay collection puts its author, the late music journalist Greg Tate, in that elite company. The reviews he produced in the 1980s accumulated into a much larger artistic project that was as interesting as his subjects. The collection’s original subtitle, lofty but justified, was “Essays on Contemporary America”.

To call Tate, who died in 2021 at the age of 64, underrated is only half-true. In British music journalism he never had the influence that fellow Americans, such as Lester Bangs or Greil Marcus, did. But in the US, Flyboy in the Buttermilk is a canonical text, originally published with a foreword by the pre-eminent critic of African American culture, Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the new introductions to this UK reissue, the musician and filmmaker Questlove calls Tate his “North Star”, while the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib dubs him “the flyest motherfucker to ever live and put pen to page”. In a posthumous special citation, the Pulitzer committee praised language that was “as influential as the content of his ideas”.

Tate liked to quote Nabokov’s line that the one legacy a writer can hope to leave is their style. His was the voice of the hipster polymath, straddling the street and the seminar with pyrotechnical bravado. Now slangy, now highbrow, his prose has an unmistakable rhythm, a tremendous confidence and an exhilarating sense of intellectual adventure. You wish you could hear it read aloud, with its quick, hot swing. As he said in a 2018 interview, “I was trying to literally approximate music on the page.”

Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1957, Tate was raised by civil rights activists but his “literary dad” was the radical poet Amiri Baraka. He taught the adolescent Tate “you can actually make a career out of vexing the King’s English until it speaks in tongues”. After studying journalism and film at Howard University, Tate began freelancing for the Village Voice, becoming a staff writer in 1987, back when an alternative weekly was the perfect place to think out loud without inhibitions. “I was encouraged to be as loud and critical and vulgar as possible,” he said. The musician Melvin Gibbs called him “one of the world’s foremost windows into what was happening” – the critic as downtown celebrity. Whether co-founding the Black Rock Coalition or profiling black female filmmakers who were (still are) overlooked next to Spike Lee or John Singleton, Tate took his platform seriously.

“Public Enemy doesn’t condescend to black youth,” he wrote in 1988. “They talk at them and way over their heads, too.” That was Tate’s voice, too. Intellectually ecumenical, he knew his Foucault and his Baudrillard, but would open an essay by recounting a conversation with a friend whose insights were just as valid. He trusted his readers to clock the references he dropped in like hip-hop samples, or to get the message either way. In his work, artists, critics and fans are all engaged in the same conversation, teeming with lists, jokes, paradoxes, wordplay and surprising juxtapositions. It’s a heady invitation to think harder and demand more.

Tate wrote well about many things: visual art, cinema, hermeneutics, the novels of William Gibson and Don DeLillo, the election of George HW Bush. “Don’t you just love the way nobody ever intends to be racist, it just happens, like an involuntary muscle spasm, or an itchy trigger finger?” he asks in one timeless aside. But his music writing was the revelation. Already schooled in the liberational possibilities of funk and jazz, he was one of the first writers to take hip hop seriously as an art form and a protest (“the sound of a cool head attached to a hot body”) but keyed in to other traditions, too. Another critic might well have thought to compare Public Enemy’s “sheets-of-sound” sampling to Romare Bearden’s collages, but not to Borges’s short stories, or the Long Island rapper Rakim to Barthes. It’s a mark of Tate’s easeful intelligence that he never seemed to flaunt his credentials or purple his prose. His attitude was: why not join these dots? Why limit yourself?

Tate’s style embodied what he valued: “The whole notion of being a black artist as being a person without boundaries,” he said in 2016. This fun and fearless border-crossing offered a third way between assimilation and the quixotic purity of “knee-jerk nationalism”, much like the artists he admired: Hendrix, Basquiat, Prince. “Flyboy in the buttermilk” is his metaphor for Basquiat’s infiltration of the 1980s New York art scene. In his landmark 1986 essay “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke”, Tate argued that black intellectuals were lagging behind: “Not many black critics have produced writing as fecund, eclectic, and freaky-deke as the art, let alone the culture itself.” That, in a nutshell, was his mission.

In “Nobody Loves a Genius Child” (1989), Tate sees Basquiat as a poet as well as a painter. He frames the artist’s “hieroglyphic ensembles” – like a rapper’s verbal dexterity – with a reminder that slaves were forbidden to learn to read or write. Thus, for black artists, “Learning carries the weight of a revolutionary act and linguistic skills are as prized as having a knockout punch.” The necessity for black Americans to communicate in ciphers, he proposes, made them proto-postmodernists, too: “Saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival… brothers and sisters got deconstruction racing through their veins.”

For Tate, black excellence was inherently resilient yet precarious. In the shadows of every black success story stand the countless unknowns whose talent was wasted by racism. In a stunningly good essay on the Harlem Renaissance, written when he was just 25, Tate observes that Harlem burned so bright because “the most brilliant talents of the race didn’t have any place else to go”. Often those protagonists burned out, too, driven half-mad by the struggle to thrive in a country that wanted them to fail. It was not enough, then, for exceptional individuals to crash the cultural citadels of white supremacy; black artists needed to build their own. Tate dreamed of “an Afrocentric cross between MIT, MoMA, MGM, Macmillan books, and Motown” to study, celebrate and advance the culture: “We don’t need any more Basquiats becoming human sacrifices in order to succeed.”

Tate’s watchword was complexity. Accepting that an artist could change your life and break your heart, he could chastise his heroes’ shortcomings without wringing his hands. In a 1991 eulogy, he hails Miles Davis as the quintessential black genius who “rendered black a synonym for the best of everything”, before signing off with a crisp condemnation of his abuse of women. Lauding Public Enemy’s Chuck D “as formidable a poetic mind as African American literary tradition has ever produced” was no obstacle to calling out the group’s “idiot blather” about gay men, women and Jews. Even Baraka, who meant so much to him, gets a rigorous audit. Tate wanted everyone to be better, even if he understood why they weren’t.

Constantly circling the question of how black artists “cross over” without losing themselves, Tate wrestled with Michael Jackson most. When he decrees “Thriller” a miracle and “Bad” an atrocity, he is offended more by Jackson’s face, bleached, remodelled and all but erased, than by the music. Contrasting Jackson’s “self-mutilation” with the canny integrationist vision of Motown founder Berry Gordy, he writes: “The difference between Gordy’s dream world and Jackson’s is that Gordy’s didn’t preclude the notion that black is beautiful.” His obituary for Jackson, reprinted in Flyboy 2: A Greg Tate Reader (2016), is a masterpiece of judicious ambivalence.

I spoke to Tate just once, for an article about the 1970s TV show Soul Train, savouring his encyclopaedic knowledge and his enthusiasm for sharing it. In middle age, he held visiting professorships at Columbia and Brown, and led an improvisational ensemble, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, whose synthesis of jazz, funk and psychedelia was typically ecumenical. Though no less insightful, his prose cooled down over time. “You realise, after a while, your thoughts are incendiary enough,” he said in 2018. But in this essential collection, fuelled by the swagger of youth and a compulsion to push things forward, sparks fly.

Dorian Lynskey is the author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End

Flyboy in the Buttermilk
Greg Tate
Penguin, 368pp, £12.99

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[Further reading: The take over]