Farrakhan hasn't overcome one or another of these moral lapses, PE might not either. power structure, they should be intelligent enough to realize that dehumanizing gays, women, and Jews isn't going to set black people free. Since PE show sound reasoning when they focus on racism as a tool of the U.S. Writing about the rap group Public Enemy, Tate took to task the sexism, homophobia and antisemitism he found in their work. Like any good critic, Tate went in on the things he hated with just as much flair as he did the things he loved. Even though three white acts they did open for, Butch Tarantulas, Hang All Four, and the Cash, is all knee-deeper into black street ridims than the Brains ever been and ain't that a bitch?Īnd that's a relatively positive writeup. Meaning that coming from a black perspective, jazz it ain't, funk it ain't hardly, and they'll probably never open for Dick Dames or Primps.

I'm talking about like lobotomy by jackhammer, like a whirlpool bath in a cement mixer, like orthodontic surgery by Black & Decker, like making love to a buzzsaw, baby. You say you want hardcore? I say the Brains'll give you hardcore coming straight up the ass, buddy. In grappling with the Black hardcore band Bad Brains in The Village Voice, Tate writes: His pieces, whether they were book reviews or essays or notes from a concert, always reminded you that art didn't exist in a vacuum - that it existed in the real world, and had real-world causes and effects. It tackled race, politics, music, and literature, and was required reading for anyone approaching culture (popular or otherwise) through the lens of criticism.Īs a stylist, Tate was assertive, artful, funny and expressive. In 1992, Tate published his first book, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. I actually got death threats from the paper's equally passionate letter writers - one in the form of a Yoruba curse - after I wrote piece about Michael Jackson's Bad in 1987 called 'I'm White!' But you also knew that your own more ethnically diverse community was reading the rag, too. 'The Voice was the recorder, messenger and proclamatory dictator of what culturally mattered in the province,' Tate told NPR, after The Village Voice announced the end of its print version.īlack writers couldn't not be aware of the irony writing as radically black as you wanted for a press organ that was perceived as very white and gay in the hood.

& Rakim to the changing nature of Black identity and the death of Michael Jackson. Starting in 1987, Tate was a longtime staff writer for The Village Voice, where he documented all facets of Black culture for the storied alt-weekly. The news was confirmed by a spokesperson at Duke University Press, his publisher. Greg Tate, the essential music writer, cultural critic and journalist, has died.

Meet joe black soundtrack listen