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Books by Greg Tate
Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking
from Black Culture /
Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America
Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black
Experience
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Why Greg Tate Matters
A Love From Outer Space
By Michael A. Gonzales
This morning, I
couldn’t write. Though I’m on deadline to finish a
Village Voice critique about my favorite band Apollo
Heights (whose disc White Music for Black People should
be blasting from your boombox right now, since its the
perfect soundtrack for the forthcoming narrative), I
can’t wrap my mind around a review at this moment.
Instead, I sat down
at the keyboard and chopped-up a textual testimonial to
one of my favorite writers, once known as Ironman.
Last Friday evening
at the Studio Museum of Harlem on a 125th Street, a
bunch of the New York Niggerati (and a few palefaces)
gathered to pay homage to cultural critic, short story
writer, musician and Black aesthetic lighting rod Greg
Tate. Looking as young as the day I first met him more
than two decades before (black don’t crack), it was
amazing that the brother was turning fifty years old.
With familiar folks
like Vernon Reid, Dream Hampton, Kevin Powell, Maureen
McMahon (whose 2004 tome
Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural
Politics of Race is a must buy), Charles Stone
III, Trey Ellis, Bruce Mack, Karen R. Good, Arthur Jafa,
Nicole Moore and others in attendance, all were gathered
to celebrate the birthday and legacy of the
Afro-American king of funky critical bop.
Though I try not to
spend too much time around other writers (their mood
swings and ego trips are often unpredictable), I was
more than happy to troop from Crown Heights, Brooklyn to
Harlem, U.S.A. to pay tribute to the man that “set it
off” for a generation of “freaky-deke cult-nat”
journalists, essayists, painters, screenwriters,
directors, et al.
For better or
worse, if it were not for Greg Tate, there would be no
Bonz Malone, Harry Allen, Joan Morgan, Kris Ex, Scott
Poulson Bryant, Toure, Danyel Smith, Michael Eric Dyson,
Karen R. Goode, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Smokey Fontaine,
John Caramanica, Jeff Chang, Amy Linden, Tom Terrell,
Mark Anthony Neal, Tricia Rose, Sasha Jenkins, DJ Spooky
(aka Paul Miller), Dream Hampton, Miles Marshall Lewis,
Aliya King, SekouWrites, Kenji Jasper, Oliver Wang, Cheo
Hodari Coker, Keith Murphy or myself.
Not to say that we
wouldn’t be writing for somebody (perhaps medical
journals or antique mags), but it was from studying
Tate’s music writing mojo like cold lampin’ graduate
students that helped give us form different options.
Like Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis, the Beatles and
Oasis, Grandmaster Flash and DJ Shadow, it was Tate and
all of us.
On that dreary
evening last week, as the sky outside cried Mary, I
strolled downstairs during the middle of former Village
Voice music poobah Robert Christgau tumbling over Tate’s
Tyrannosaurus sized word play as he read an essay that
he had edited years ago. Please don’t ask me the title,
but I know it was one of those funky joints that Tate
had scribbled when he was still calling himself
“Ironman” back in the early ‘80s.
One brief aside:
Greg’s guitar strumming homie Vernon Reid later
commented, “I always loved Greg because he had named
himself after my second favorite Marvel Comics
character.” Truthfully, I always thought the “Ironman”
moniker was swiped from the esteemed Eric Dolphy disc.
Who knows, maybe we’re both right.
While I never
shared the same enthusiasm for the writing style of the
so-called “Dean of American Rock Critics” that
editors/writers Joe Levy, Ann Powers, Eric Weisbard, RJ
Smith, among others have for Christgau, I will always be
thankful to the man for being unafraid to be, as Tate
himself once described him, “a one-man affirmative
action committee in the 1980s…all because he believed
Afro-diasporic musics should on occasion be covered by
people who weren't strangers to those communities.”
In other words, it
took more than a few youngbloods wielding fine-point
pens, hostile attitudes and boogaloo styles to scare
Bob. My homie Barry Michael Cooper, who would later
become a great writer himself, told me how when he was a
novice he called Christgau at home one night out the
blue. In an interview we did for Stop Smiling
magazine earlier this year, Cooper related this funny
anecdote.
“I called him up at
12:00 midnight and said, ‘May I speak to Robert
Christgau please?’ He said, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ I
said, ‘My name is Barry Cooper.’ And he said, ‘Who the
fuck is Barry Cooper?’ ‘Well, I’m a writer,” I said. ‘I
just wanna tell you I love the newspaper. I love the
music criticism, but that piece on Bootsy’s Rubber Band
was bullshit. I used to get high to this in college and
I can write about it.’ He said, “I’ll tell you what, do
you have anything?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I wanna do something
on Parliament- Funkadelic.’ At the time, they had an
album called Glory A la Stupid. And he said,
‘Bring it to me. Let me take a look at it. If it’s any
good, I’ll run it. If it’s not, if you call me again
I’ll have you arrested for harassment.’”
Despite the fact
that I never worked with Christgau, I clearly remember
when he contacted former Set to Run publicity honcho
Leyla Turkkan in 1992 (who at the time, handled most of
the Def Jam acts, the Delicious Vinyl artists and Ice
Cube), and he was on a serious mission to recruit more
“urban writers” to vote in the annual Pazz & Jop poll;
it might not seem like such a big deal today, but back
then…”
Hell, that was
during the same period that one prominent Caucasian
music editor (who is still in a position of editorial
power today) told the same publicist something along the
lines of, “…black music writers don’t write that well.”
It’s crazy what some people believe. However, if you’ve
taken a glance at Rolling Stone, Blender,
GQ, Esquire and New York magazines
lately, that opinion still seems prevalent in 2007.
Though I haven’t
looked at Spin thoroughly in recent months (with
the exception of their cool ass “Punk ‘77” issue last
month), I can honestly say that former editors John
Leland, Frank Owen, Simon Reynolds, Sia Michel and
Charles Aaron (who still slaves there) were more down
with the Negroes (Barry Michael Cooper, Bonz Malone,
Quincy Troupe, and Sasha Jenkins) than any other music
glossies. Hey, I’m just saying.
But, rewinding back
to the subject at hand: in the early ‘80s, when crack
first emerged in Washington Heights and I still lived
uptown in my grandma’s 151st crib, I chanced upon Tate’s
byline in the Village Voice. Though I had wanted
to be a writer since I was a one-finger typing kid
ripping-off Twilight Zone plots and, later,
hoping to sell scripts to DC Comics when I was thirteen
(oh, the wonders of youth), I was a voracious reader who
at the time was addicted to the so-called New Journalism
posse.
A geek college
dropout, I went to the library everyday after my midtown
messenger gig and devoured old magazine stories by my
lit heroes Nik Cohn, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill,
Jimmy Breslin and Orde Coombs. At the time, between
delivering packages to random Broadway actresses on the
upper west side and superstar designers in the garment
district, I wrote small stories for random magazines,
but nothing major.
Truth of it was,
there weren’t many options for a young Black writer who
hadn’t grazed through the ivy of Yale, Brown or Harvard;
or, so I thought. Truth of it was, there was no such
thing as The Source, Vibe or XXL,
and being a hip-hop writer meant either tagging subway
walls or writing rhymes in your notebook. Truth of it
was, none of us had any idea how big this monster called
rap would grow before it started to eat itself, but we
loved it (I’ve never thought of hip-hop as HER, but
maybe that’s my own lack of sensitivity) with a serious
passion.
As my Brooklyn bred
homeboy, acclaimed journalist and director Nelson George
once said on some N.Y.U. symposium in 2004, “I remember
receiving hostile reactions from many editors when I
tried to write about it [hip-hop]…as if hip-hop were an
infection that could be cured by simply ignoring it.”
While my mind is
now slightly weary and more than a few brain cells have
been blunted away in project staircases, I’ll guess it
was sometime in late early ’85 when I plucked down my
single dollar at a shabby newsstand and picked up that
weeks Village Voice. Yes kids, we actually had to
BUY it back then—there
were no free lunches or free Voice.
Boarding the subway
at 145th and Broadway, I copped a squat on the #1 train.
“I love the smell of ink in the morning,” I thought,
opening the paper. God, how I wish I could remember what
was the first Tate piece I devoured, but that’s not the
point at all. What I’m really trying to say is, “Dat
nigga changed my life!” The last time that had happened
was when I heard Mile's Water Babies in 10th
grade, flipped the fuck out.
In a few years
other folks of color (as opposed to, er, colored folks)
like Nelson George, Lisa Jones, Barry Michael Cooper,
Carol Cooper (no relation), Pablo Guzman and Harry Allen
would also bum rush the post-soul/hot funk/hip-hop
journalism show in the Village Voice, but it was
big brother Tate who led the way.
“Mommy, what’s a
semiotic?” I wanted to scream after reading that first
piece. Yet, since this was a time before computers,
aspiring writers actually had to leave the crib to do
research. It wasn’t long before I was buying old James
Brown and Funkadelic albums at the Music Factory in
Times Square (where cranky, cigar smoking Stanley
Platzer reined supreme), reading dusty paperbacks by
Samuel R. Delany and Ishmael Reed, tripping through the
post-structuralism weirdness of Jean Baudrillard and
Jacques Derrida and having my mind blown by Clement
Greenberg as well as a mothership of other musical and
literary others.
Though some stuff I
still don’t get (“…yo Kidd, what’s up wit dat bugged
mofo Cecil Taylor shit anyway?”), I am more than happy
that Greg Tate had put up the signposts for this black
boy to follow. In fact, one of those signs might have
read: Enter At Your Own Risk…This Means You!
Unlike today, (I
say as I shake my big daddy cane at the kids throwing
rocks at my window) where one can rant opinions on a
blog until they’re red, black and green in the face,
that luxury wasn’t an option in our yesteryear.
It wasn’t until
almost a year later that I wrote two music reviews for a
friend’s punk zine called Misspent Sonics that I
finally got a chance to test the waters of my future
profession. Since I wasn’t that much of a punk since
hanging-out at the Marble Bar in Baltimore (hell, even
David Byrne and The Clash had discovered Africa by
1986), I offered to review Fishbone’s self-titled EP and
the Beastie Boys debut Licensed to Ill .
Written in a fog of
reefer smoke and malt liquor (by that that point I had
discovered Hunter Thompson and Lester Bangs too), I sat
in front of a black, electric Smith Corona and banged to
the boogie. Once the pieces were printed, it didn’t take
long for someone to point out that I had Xeroxed Greg
Tate’s mau-mau/voodoo/ post-bop/pirate-radio/hoo-doo
style.
“That’s not true,”
I lied. “We’ve just been both influenced by the same
writers.” Yeah, right. True, I too drank from the well
of wild stylists like Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange and
Clarence Major, but it was Tate who had guided me to
that black water in the first place.
After joining the
Black Rock Coalition in 1985 at the urging of guitarist
Vernon Reid (whom I met by chance in Sounds Records over
on St. Marks Place), I would see Greg on a regular. Yet,
much to my dismay he didn’t talk much; at least not to
me. That is, not until I had penned a story about
Living Colour in a now defunct East Village rag
called Cover when I was twenty-three.
One night, as I
stood in line at the long gone Lone Star Café, I saw
Tate in front of the door. “Yo, Michael,” he said. I
looked at him, shocked that he even knew my name. “I
read your story in Cover. It was pretty good.”
Staring at him,
baffled by the compliment, I simply mumbled, “Thank
you,” as I thought my head might explode. Stepping out
of the line with my then girlfriend Fran, I ducked
around the corner, breathing deeply.
“Are you all
right?” Fran asked. "You have an asthma attack or
something?"
“He liked it,” I
muttered, still unbelieving. “The nigga liked my story.”
“What are you
talking about?”
“Greg Tate. I can’t
believe it, he liked my article.” Fran stared at me as
though I was nuts. Grinning like a fool, I hoped that
nobody saw my silly ass losing my mind. It was crazy,
but for at that exact moment that I felt like a true
writer.
Twenty-one years
later, as the ever-lovely writer/director Dream Hampton
stood in front of the Studio Museum podium sprinkling
accolades on Greg Tate’s formerly dread-locked head, I
thought about the few real times I had spent within the
presence of the master: can’t forget the nigga’s party
in ’88 when he played an advance of Public Enemy’s
instant classic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold
Us Back all night long; can’t forget the
night he first played guitar in public at the old
Houston Street version of the Knitting Factory, while a
few “real” musicians talked shit in the back of the
joint; can’t forget the night we shared a cab back
uptown one ‘80s night, with guitar extraordinaire Jean
Paul Bourelly and future wunderkind producer Craig
Street; can’t forget that recent night this past July,
when a bunch of the Bronx Biannual literary
magazine crew including editor Miles Marshall Lewis, Sun
Singleton, Carol Taylor, Reginald Lewis (& his wonderful
wife Melinda) and brilliant singer Stephanie McKay hung—out
all night long, talking mad shit at NoHo Star until last
call.
Though I won’t
front that Greg Tate and I had ever became real friends
(sure we know each other, slap five on occasion and talk
much smack when we’re standing next to one another at an
event), I can honestly say, if it wasn’t for his early
writings in the Village Voice (as well as the
Musician, Record, Down Beat and other
magazines), who knows where I might be right now.
To paraphrase a
line from the gangster rappers interview handbook, if it
wasn’t for Greg "Ironman" Tate, I might be robbing your
house right now.
Source:
Blackadelicpop
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posted 27 October 2007 |
