My introduction to the original edition of Flyboy in the Buttermilk came not long out of college, when I moved into a scuzzy rooming house in downtown Toronto with the student-journalism compadre who’d also go to punk and jazz shows with me. The first day, I was semi-competitively eyeballing Doug’s bookshelves, as you do when you’re hungry young culturati, and the words “greg tate” in lowercase red ink jumped out from a black paperback spine. “Wait!” I thought. “There’s a book?!” I probably fronted to Doug that I already knew. Flyboy would have been out just around then, the summer of 1992.
Greg Tate was primarily a music critic, though he delved into literature and film, too, and sounded off on current events when he felt community leaders and his fellow Black-nationalist activists were whiffing on key points. He wrote the manifesto for the anti-racist musicians’ alliance the Black Rock Coalition and would later become a performing guitarist and bandleader himself. But it was his writing that gave him such stature that when he died—prematurely, like many of the artists he wrote about, of a heart attack at age sixty-four in December 2021—the legendary Apollo in Harlem put his name up on the marquee. To me in 1992 he was literally the hippest of the hip, the most brain-melting of all the mind-blowing voices in the culture pages of the era’s Village Voice, like C. Carr, J. Hoberman, Gary Indiana, Donna Gaines, Erik Davis, Carol Cooper, Vince Aletti, Nelson George, and James Wolcott, to name a few. Music editor Robert Christgau spotted Tate’s aura as soon as a Nona Hendryx live review came over the transom in 1981 from DC, where Tate lived after graduating from Howard University. Christgau didn’t print that one, but said he was eager for more like it, and Tate moved to NYC in an eyeblink.
Dubbing himself “Ironman” after both the Marvel comics character and the Eric Dolphy album, Tate machine-gunned gold nuggets across the page in what-the-fuck sentences with the cadences of rap—of which he was the first crucial theoretician—plus the cognitive dissonances of free jazz, a fat bassline of moral clarity, and a syncopated shuffle of cultural-political thought set in spin as if Stuart Hall and Roland Barthes were tag-teaming it behind the turntables. Sample for instance the notorious linguistic Molotov that Tate lobbed Michael Jackson’s way in 1987 for his deracinating cosmetic surgeries as well as his musical regressions on Bad: “As a black American success story the Michael Jackson of Thriller is an extension of the Motown integrationist legacy. But the Michael Jackson as skin job represents the carpetbagging side of black advancement in the affirmative action era. . . . In this sense Jackson’s decolorized flesh reads as the buppy version of Dorian Gray, a blaxploitation nightmare that offers this moral: Stop, the face you save may be your own.”
Until that day in front of Doug’s bookcase, I assumed that if you wanted to hold on to any of what Tate was laying down, you’d better scissor the articles out and stick them in a folder (as we did thenadays) because otherwise they’d all soon be fish wrap. That kind of ephemeral elusiveness felt like part of the deal, that every piece was a happening in time and space, a shuttle briefly alighting before heading back to the mothership, and you either caught it or got caught short. If they were going to collect Tate’s work, it ought to have been via some William Gibson–esque virtual-reality headset or in a hologram that you could only access at an after-hours joint behind a bodega with a password like, “Funkadelic was too wacky for the souled-out splibs and too black for the spazz whiteys who believed hard rock only came in Caucasoid.” A bookseemed so pedestrian—but it also seemed like a miracle that some suit at Simon & Schuster greenlit it.
I imagine they’d have preferred the title and subtitle to be more like the cheesy copy they blew up on the back cover: “Are You Ready for the Hiphop Nation?” The actual title, taken from Tate’s posthumous essay on Jean-Michel Basquiat, had to be decoded to convey that, like the painter, Tate was a rare Black infiltrator in white-controlled cultural spheres, and from the hip-hop generation to boot. It came with a subtitle befitting the book’s true heft: Essays on Contemporary America. It also racked up more uses of the word “motherfuckers” than any text I’d ever read before, though often in mutations like “muhfukuhs” or “furthermuckers.” Clearly one needed to grab this thing and guard it like a sacred tablet dug out from the desert sands. I stole Doug’s for a while till I got my own, which across the decades has become one of a handful of books I regularly pull off the shelf just to soak in a few paragraphs and juice the brain up into writing mode.
Yet for a long time I underestimated its impact. In my own mostly pinkskinned rockcrit orbits, the writers most pathologically mimicked by rookies tended to be Lester Bangs (also an influence on Tate) and, by the later ’90s, David Foster Wallace. I picked up my own mild infections there, too, but Tate was the one who truly got the envy burning. Thankfully I couldn’t do much about it, as I didn’t have personal access to the cultural sources of his scansion and would have sounded like an offensively deluded wanksta wannabe if I’d tried. Still, I was sometimes surprised one didn’t spot the marks of Tate’s trail more often. It was only as the broader music press got less segregated (not to say truly desegregated) that I realized how rife Tate discipleship was among BIPOC cultural writers and thinkers in the media and the academy alike. Some even jokingly called themselves “Tater Tots,” making Tate maybe the only music writer ever cool enough to have his own “Beyhive”-style fan-army sobriquet. But unlike with Bangs, you couldn’t copycat the Ironman on style and attitude alone, because so much of the style was in the array of knowledge and references he juggled even as the sentences made their syllabic head-spins. If you wanted to sound like him, you’d have to do some heavyweight homework, and by the time you’d put in those hours you probably were closer to gestating a genuine voice of your own. And anyway it was the unjust case that as in many realms of American endeavor, if you were going to critic while Black, you’d have to do it to a higher standard than (hi!) the average white boy. Greg Tate was that standard.
Nevertheless, Flyboy was allowed to go out of print, which generates icky feelings as does the fact that the Pulitzer Prize committee granted him recognition with a special citation only in 2024, several years after his death. It took twenty-four years for the first collection finally to get a sequel, which came from Duke University Press in 2016, titled Flyboy 2,almost as if this were the Star Wars franchise of cultural criticism, to which I’d say hell yeah—to quote Tate’s frequent subject Public Enemy, “The Empire Strikes Black.”That volume hoovered up more of the writing Tate continued to do for the Voice into the 2000s, his long-running “Black Owned” column for Vibe in the ’90s, and occasionals for other publications and institutions. But as Tate himself acknowledged, his style mellowed some with maturity, though the substance was never watered down. So for the hardcore torrential face-smacking tang of Tate, the first Flyboy remains the debut album, the mother lode.
Now, in the fifth year past his death, here it is resurrected by Auwa Books, an imprint of FSG directed by drummer/writer/film producer/cultural uplifter Questlove, who in his foreword says, “Greg was the first person who validated the art that I loved and made it intellectually viable. I never heard anyone speak of hip-hop in those terms before him.” There’s also an introduction by the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, likely the current most widely read Tate inheritor in print, who rhapsodizes on “the many ways that Greg Tate loved Black people”—enough to praise but also enough to challenge, and especially enough to write in a diction true to the culture. We also still get the original foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who to his credit grasped Tate’s importance even though he’d taken some lumps from Tate in print, as seen here in 1985’s “Yo, Hermeneutics!” Gates makes that the very occasion of his praise: “What Tate understands is that culture, Afro-American culture in particular, is never a matter of either-or. He can both celebrate the energizing pull of cultural nationalism and register its limitations, moral and intellectual.” Gates always knew when to curry favor instead of starting a bun-fight, which both justifies the side-eye Tate gave to some of Gates’s strategic maneuvering and is why Gates gets to host PBS series and you don’t.
Tate didn’t either, though they would have made for much more electrifying television. I’d rather have his version of the history of jazz than Ken Burns’s more doctrinaire one (though one surprising thing about revisiting Flyboy is how relatively gentle he was on Burns collaborator Wynton Marsalis’s conservative take on the music in the ’80s). I’d also take, please and thank you, Tate’s documentary series on the Harlem Renaissance, on the Black Arts Movement, and on the genesis of hip-hop, too (covering all five elements, natch). No doubt such works would have been too disruptive in both form and content for producers and funders. Tate’s spiritual cinematic siblings were many, such as Julie Dash and early Spike Lee (in the moment he thought She’s Gotta Have It represented a “coup of staggering proportions . . . a populist black post-structuralist’s dream”), but his nearest and dearest in the film fraternity was the cinematographer Arthur Jafa, whose video essays Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) and The White Album (2018) are the nearest things to a Tate essay come to full audiovisual life. They are not coming soon to a pledge drive near you.
As much as Tate’s sentences still crackle and pop off the page, the new Flyboy edition does carry the baggage of being a collection of pieces mostly written for a weekly bolt of newsprint roughly thirty-five to forty-five years ago. They inevitably have lost a lot of immediacy—especially in the final section of commentary on several racially charged killings and trials in ’80s New York, but even with some of the cultural subjects. This is hopefully not the case with Public Enemy, Don DeLillo, De La Soul, Basquiat, Funkadelic, Samuel R. Delany, Bad Brains, Santana, or even (debatable) Ice-T. It is surely not the case with Miles Davis, one of Tate’s lodestars, though some current jazzheads may be bemused by how hard he goes in on defending Davis’s funk-rock fusion records like On the Corner and Bitches’ Brew, which are pretty much universally beloved and influential today—not realizing that’s in no small part because of the irresistible cases Tate mounted for them in his two-part 1983 essay “The Electric Miles” in Downbeat, against a near monolith of jazz-purist skepticism. A lot more of us could still stand to listen closer to Tate favorites like Pangea and Agharta (both 1975), if only to grasp the nuances of the writer’s paeans to Davis sideman Pete Cosey, whom he calls the Cecil Taylor of the electric guitar. Guitar mattered to Tate—he played Strat himself, and if there was a nucleus around which his taste revolved it was probably Jimi Hendrix, the subject of his one and only full-length book, Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (2003).
Contemporary readers might find a few of Tate’s other picks here curious, not recalling e.g. the brief passionate affair between music criticdom at large and the Black British “dreampop” duo A. R. Kane, who get a few pages along with the even obscurer likes of R&B artists Aveda and Marc Anthony Thompson. Right-thinking poptimistic types might also be taken aback by the few withering words Tate has for disco: “On black radio [Parliament-Funkadelic] functioned as active opposition to a form of record industry sabotage dubbed ‘disco’—or as I like to pun it, dis-COINTELPRO, since it destroyed the self-supporting black band movement which P-Funk (jes) grew out of.”
I might count that as one case of this book’s low-key straight-male-centrism, in its choice of subjects and arguably somewhat in style and theoretical framework. The only women creators dealt with in depth, aside from Aveda, are the filmmakers in the 1991 piece “Cinematic Sisterhood,” and while it’s done with loving dedication, I can’t help but note that it’s in a list/survey format, quite unlike the lionizing focus of most of Tate’s essays. Careful, now—this is very far from me saying Tate was sexist. On the contrary, he was one of the first critics to call male rap artists loudly out on their animus towards women, famously making it one of his reasons (along with their flashes of anti-Semitism) to withhold full approval from Public Enemy at their peak. He delivers the barb the way he knew it would sting most: “By my homegirl’s reckoning all the misogyny is the result of PE suffering from LOP: lack of pussy. She might have a point.” Tate also doesn’t hesitate to end his Miles Davis obituary by condemning the musician’s unabashed abuse of women: “Miles may have swung like a champion but on that score he went out like a roach.” And he stirringly concludes the whole collection with the essay “Love and the Enemy,” where he ranks machismo first among causes for the failings of the Black-nationalist movement in which he’d invested his hopes, and makes a plea to follow the examples of Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and other women writers in how to think about “the pain and trauma beneath the rage.” I’m simply saying that in this phase Tate’s critical praxis had not quite caught up with his feminist and queer-positive principles. In the work in Flyboy 2, that’s all fully integrated.
Less consequentially, today’s readers might also be jolted by some of Tate’s early mixed feelings on Prince. In 1984 he positioned the Purple One among a “Treacherous Three” with Eddie Murphy and Wynton Marsalis as creatures of crossover and careerism who “managed to merge their Stagolee sides with their Proper Negro profiles. . . . All of which is cool until you realize what’s won America’s heart isn’t the designer original but the reasonable facsimile—not crazed black genius but black subterfuge.” Not to worry, Tate came around, writing likely the single greatest appreciation of Prince after his death in 2016, as he also did for David Bowie that year—both in the brief span when MTV News was the most happening music website under the stewardship of Jessica Hopper, and both now vanished from the online archive due to corporate ownership machinations. Those two pieces alone are reason enough to call for a Flyboy 3: Return of the JET-Eye to preserve the rest of the oeuvre, including various liner notes, lectures, interviews, and other uncollected miscellany. Every great pop-culture blockbuster deserves a trilogy.
What this reissue of the first Flyboy lacks is some structural furniture to buttress against that creeping threat of datedness. Insightful tributes from known names like Questlove and Abdurraqib are well and good, but limited compared to what a lively biographical and historical preface by a Black cultural scholar would do for the uninitiated. It would cover matters like Tate’s origins in a civil rights and pan-African activist family, first in Dayton, Ohio, and then in DC, where his mother, Florence, became the press secretary on Marion Barry’s mayoral campaign and administration and then on Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential bid. It would give some sense of Tate’s HBCU education and social life, as well as the Black cultural nationalist activism he was responding to (how many young readers now know that much about Louis Farrakhan, much less the Five Percenters?) and the Black-bohemian milieu Tate moved in—“Cult Nats Meet Freaky-Deke,” as he calls it in the title of one of the most manifesto-like Flyboy pieces, from 1986.
Beyond that, an intro should probably have offered some notes about where Tate stands in the timeline of Black arts criticism—both ancestors and descendants—and some basic explanations of what The Village Voice even was, likewise the Black Rock Coalition, and for instance Tate’s own efforts to launch literary-cultural journals of his own design such as B. Culture and Coon Bidness.The reader can cobble most of this together from Tate’s own robust intro to Flyboy 2, from Tricia Romano’s fine 2024 oral history of the Voice, The Freaks Come Out to Write (Tate gave her the title), and online. But for this new edition to serve as both springboard for the uninitiated and lasting archival document, that stuff belongs here, with some kind of external temporizing eye. There also should be (as in Flyboy 2) a list of exactly where and when the original pieces ran, again for the permanent record, which at this juncture is the stakes of the game.
One thing this edition gets completely right is its timing, since for the past year we’ve collectively been revisiting the culture wars of the ’80s with only the mildest revisions, and with an ’80s tabloid dinosaur at the top. While ICE acts out the Purge on the streets, baby tech bros have been set loose with AI-powered chainsaws to hack the “DEI”—reduced to a euphemism for any non-white influence at all—out of federal and cultural institutions. As Tate wrote of the white art establishment’s backlash against Basquiat and others, “This might be understandable if they didn’t already own every fucking thing under the sun and make no bones of dehumanizing the rest of us to maintain hegemony.” With its re-humanizing sprezzatura that always unveils the power grid beneath the everyday as well as the personal stakes in the systemic, Flyboy is a handbook for preserving your own wild sanity under the terrordome. You should pilfer it from your best friend’s bookshelf posthaste.
Carl Wilson is the music critic at Slate and publishes his own newsletter, “Crritic!,” via https://carlwilson.substack.com.