Greg Tate Died: What Was His Cause Of Death?

Musician and hip hop critic pioneer Greg Tate is dead. The music world mourns the disappearance of musician and pioneer of hip hop journalism Greg Tate, one of the most responsible for the spread of black culture over the past four decades.

He was born in Dayton, Ohio, but has called New York “home” since the early 1980s, where he has closely followed its contemporary cultural manifestations. There, he founded the band Black Rock Coalition and, later, Burnt Sugar, the Arkestra Chamber, the latter more focused on jazz and improvised music and which produced the greatest number of albums over more than 20 years.

But it was through the lyrics that “Ironman’s” vision elicited the most influence, he who was a veteran of The Village Voice’s writing, where he stood out as one of the first critics to pay serious attention to hip hop phenomenon. In 1992, he published Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, an “eye-opener” served with doses of analytical thoughts that focused not only on music or literature but also on politics and racial issues. In 2016, the brilliant book that introduced us to a new disciple of Amiri Baraka was entitled to a succession, through Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader. He was currently working on James Brown’s Body and the Revolution of the Mind.

For Hua Hsu, a critic of The New Yorker, there is a whole new generation of music thinkers whose foundations lie in the pillars Tate built: “His career has served as a reminder that diversity is not just about a splash of color in a photo of the group; it’s about the different ways people see, feel and move in the world.”

Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience was two other literary works signed by the man who also shared some of his vast knowledge by the students of Brown universities and Columbia to over the past few years.

The cause of death was not revealed.

Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.

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