A Note In Praise Of Greg Tate
By Hanif Abdurraqib
Author’s Note: I have been dedicated to making 68to05 a place not for my own writing, but for the writing of others. A place where people other than myself could unravel their excitements and obsessions, with me (and others) as an audience. I am breaking from that mission briefly today, as I am heartbroken about the loss of Greg Tate. And, through that heartbreak, I am aware that this project — like so many others I have been lucky enough to take on — is inextricably linked to the inspiration and ambition I found in Greg’s work. Thank you for spending any time with this at all.
In 1988, Greg Tate wrote about Eric B. & Rakim’s Follow The Leader in the Village Voice. I didn’t read the piece in 1988, to be sure. When I was intermittently without housing, I’d spend time at the main library in downtown Columbus, Ohio. There, if one was so inclined, they could browse a digital archive of newspapers from around the nation, around the globe. I first encountered Greg Tate within that dark cubicle cavern – Greg Tate writing about Follow The Leader as an album of demonic impulses, Rakim as an MC that made his blood run cold, before drawing a clear line from the God MC to Al Green to Miles Davis, so tight that I missed it and had to scroll back up the page. At the very end of the piece, Tate adds a separate note, firing back at Public Enemy’s Chuck D, who had dissed him in a Spin Magazine interview some weeks earlier, calling him a house nigger.
“Inquiring minds want to know what I think of Chuck D branding yo’ reporter The Village Voice‘s porch nigger and a sell-out in the current Spin,” he begins. “ostensibly behind doing the right thing and busting PE’s monkey-asses on charges of homophobia, sexism, and anti-Semitism. What I think is grits ain’t groceries, and the Mona Lisa was a man.”
It’s an exchange that might be hard to imagine now, in part because it is easier these days to tap on some fool’s proverbial door and publicly air whatever long-held (or short-held) grievances might be rattling the cages of your rage or misery or boredom. But it’s also hard to imagine because that kind of tension between artist and critic can no longer fearlessly flourish in an economy where musicians threaten corporations over lukewarm album or concert reviews, and the corporations bend, or break entirely.
Yes, the easy word that comes to mind is “fearless,” but that is a primary color, made up of a great many other shades. An absence of an expected emotion. What I mean to say, then, is that there is a border between rage and curiosity that I find myself struggling to keep my balance on some days, and it is the work and voice of Greg Tate that steadies me. There is a line between wanting to know, and understanding that desire has no end, and few happy endings. A house with infinite doors. Against this reality, and a constant hunger to uncover what a person must in order to properly contextualize and indict the world they are tumbling through, who the fuck has time for fear?
The work of Greg Tate always appeared to me as the end result of a deep dissatisfaction with what he, and other black folks were being told about what they had (and continued) to give to the world. Or, to zoom in a bit more, dissatisfaction with what was allegedly supposed to move him to give a shit, compared to what actually did move him to give a shit. Never mind the Sex Pistols, Bad Brains got something for they ass.
From Greg Tate’s work, I learned that a small intimacy with my dissatisfactions is how I end up here, on the other side, writing with a fluorescent affection about the things I love if only because they have convinced me, again, to stay in the world. That the world might have something for me after all. The small moments that someone else might foolishly let slip away, or imagine as fleeting. The way I felt and still feel when I read Greg Tate on a sentence-level and feel like I am being both schooled and loved on with equal ferocity. The way I was, and still am, shown the colors beyond the obvious horizon.
And of course, Greg Tate knew the secret America hasn’t ever been able to keep up with: the multitude of ways black folks communicate, and it ain’t all spoken, but it’s all language. In A Little Devil In America, I write briefly about the difference between showing off and showing out. It’s both an invented theory and not, and here is where I show my hand in praise of my newly departed brilliant blueprint, who – through teaching me, will teach many more. What I remember most from that Eric B. And Rakim article is a line about Rakim and Miles Davis and the kind of black folks you might be lucky enough to know – the type that are loud even when they don’t got much to say. Greg Tate was talking about a self-confirmed cool. One that doesn’t require an audience. “You don’t need spectators to know you’re looking sugarshit sharp. Drop Miles or Rakim on the moon, they’d still be chilly-most.”
Greg Tate could speak on this because he was an expert in that type of self-confirmed impenetrable cool. No one was fucking with Greg Tate and even if someone thought they were, it didn’t matter, because he wrote, and made music, and saw the world like someone who knew they couldn’t be fucked with. He leaves behind a lot of free game for those who might be wise enough to receive it. But that’s the bit of it I need the most, and the most often.
And while I am here, heartbroken on a day where the world that didn’t know the work of Greg Tate as I did moves on in a drone of meetings and emails and mundane responsibilities outside the orbit of my own immense sadness, it is a good time to mention gratitude. The ways I’ve fallen short in offering it in real time, and the ways I will again, even though I won’t want to. I’m not sure I ever adequately expressed how much Greg Tate’s work meant to me, probably because I couched it in some nonsense about not having the words, or put it off. There are emails I didn’t send, letters I didn’t write. Today, at least, in the wreckage of this particular sadness, I would hope to be better about telling people of their brilliance while they are still among us. I would hope that anyone reading this who might want to be better at that joins me in trying. It isn’t enough to only bestow gratitude upon the ancestors, we must also generously furnish the gardens of the living while they are still present.
I’m not up to the task of the work I do, most days. I am still too cynical, or too down on the world. I trip over that tricky border between rage and curiosity and end up on one side or the other, too overwhelmed to move. It will always be the work of Greg Tate that reminds me of how wide my pockets can be. How much of the world I can hold in them at once. The writer I am today is a series of happy failures. I have been reaching for Greg Tate for so much of my life now. Not to be better, or even as good as. But just to see if I could get close to asking the kind of questions he asked of songs, of art, of himself. I’m so thankful that I’ve gotten to fail in my reaching. I’m so thankful that Greg Tate was there for me to reach towards for so long.