At the time, the alt-weekly newspaper was the medium most comfortable for publishing with high stakes, open ears, indelible flair, infinite possibilities. And in that ecosystem, Tate was the lodestar. Take “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke,” a visionary essay that appeared in The Voice in 1986 and called for a “popular post-structuralism — accessible lyrics that aim to deconstruct all black culture.” It was a call for critical weapons to ascend to the “post-nationalist” output of the time – in short, Tate wanted colleagues as ambitious and wild-minded as the culture he championed.
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When he loved something, he braced himself. About Miles Davis: “‘Bitches Brew’ is an orchestral marvel as it combines James Brown’s antiphonal riffs with a metaphorical bass drone featuring Sly’s minimalist polyrhythmic melodies and Jimi’s concept of painting pictures with ordered sequences of electronic sounds.”
When he was frustrated by something, he braced himself. In a roast of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”, and in a sense, of Jackson himself: “Jackson’s de-colored flesh reads like the buppy version of Dorian Gray, a blaxploitation nightmare that offers this moral: Stop, the face you saves can be yours.” (When Jackson died in 2009, Tate’s memorial tribute loudly confirmed Jackson’s place in the soul pantheon, while still concerned with the personal choices Jackson made, especially in his later years.)
And he planted flags early on. Critics for Tate had of course written about rap music, but his early pieces on Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, De La Soul and others are the definitive critical assignments of their time. They argued not only for a hip-hop canon, but also for hip-hop if canon.
Not long after “Flyboy” came out in 1992, Tate brought his pen to Vibe magazine, which was nurtured in its infancy by a cosmohemical sensibility in downtown New York that he helped shape with his mere presence.
His column, ‘Black-Owned’, was a staple and megaphone proclaiming the most forward-thinking creators from all disciplines. In the October 1993 issue, one of the magazine’s first, he wrote a dynamic full-page poem entitled “What Is Hip-Hop?”: “Hip-Hop Is Reverse Capitalism/Hip-Hop Is Reverse Colonialism.”