Stay up as late into the night as you want arguing about the other two names and the final order, but Greg Tate’s position as one of the top three music writers of all time is not negotiable. The former staff writer for The Village Voice and author of The Vibe’s ‘Black Owned’ column—who sadly died last week at the age of sixty-four brought his readers an intense brand of illumination which his premature passing will do nothing to diminish.

While heavyweight tributes in establishment newspapers testified to his cultural capital on the other side of the Atlantic, Tate’s name is less well-known in Britain, but the scope of his legacy requires a grander memorial than someone who wrote the occasional piece for The Wire would usually command. His characteristically sage and playful appearances in recent documentaries on Miles Davis (Birth of the Cool, available on Netflix) and Afrofuturism (Dark Matter: A History of the Afrofuture, available on BBC iPlayer) are the perfect introduction to a critical persona distinguished by its warmth and humour as well as by its stylistic swagger, intellectual fleet-footedness, and impassioned erudition.

The next port of call in any Tate guided tour has to be his hard-to-find but massively worth-the-effort 1992 Simon & Schuster anthology Flyboy In The Buttermilk (surely long overdue a repress by an enterprising publisher with an eye on posterity). The impact of reading this book on its initial publication is as firmly lodged in my consciousness as the experiences of first hearing Massive Attack’s Blue Lines or A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory—which, given its author’s claim that his criticism at the time aspired to the condition of the music, is presumably exactly the effect intended. Cornel West’s introduction, while calmly noting that he himself had felt the rough side of Tate’s tongue as a side-effect of the latter’s determination ‘to thresh out the wheat from the chaff in critical theory’, memorably credits Tate’s ‘experiments in recombinant syntax’ with establishing a ‘teenage mutant b-boy cadence’ that was all their own. But Tate was just as at home with art and film and literature as he was with music, and for all the swashbuckling vigour of his vernacular modulations, the content of his writing endures as well as the style.

Perhaps the single greatest contribution of his writing from inside rap’s late eighties golden age was to clarify once and for all the ancestral linkage between hip-hop and jazz. Tate did this not as an uncritical cheerleader, but in a way which involved asking awkward questions of both Ice Cube and Wynton Marsalis, and calling out the ‘whack retarded philosophy’ at that point being espoused by elements within his beloved Public Enemy. ‘No way in hell’, he thundered, ‘did Bird, believing there was no competition in music, will his legacy to some second generation Beboppers to rattle over the heads of the hip-hop nation like a rusty sabre’, and what Greg had joined together no man—nor woman neither—could put asunder.

At its best, Tate’s writing combined the moral certainty of the storefront preacher, the rapier thrust of the intellectual salon, and the bawdy thrill of the brothel comic. His insistence that such multitudes not only could but should be contained within a single sentence, never mind a paragraph, flew gleefully in the face of the restrictive practices so often prevailing (in different ways and for different reasons) in both commercial journalism and academic discourse, two realms that he inhabited with equal facility.

In the revealing introduction to 2016’s Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader (the twenty-four-year interval not an extended lost weekend but rather testimony to a miraculously intact mojo), Tate talked about ‘keeping one ear to the street, one ear to the academy, and a phantom third hearing organ to my own little artsy-fartsy corner of Gotham and Brooklyn’s Black bohemia’.  Although I had never knowingly listened to his free jazz big band Burnt Sugar (on account of a superstitious wariness of the critic/practitioner), it was reassuring to see Tate’s critical instincts in no way dulled by the contemplation of his own musical oeuvre: ‘I got so much joy out of it’, he noted, ‘that I found myself thinking in moments of ecstasy and delirium that I’d rather be a mediocre musician than a great writer.’ He’d not lost his edge when it came to writing about hip-hop either, asserting fearlessly that the emergence of Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs (‘a major talent scout but no talent’) ‘signified that Black Mediocrity was now as commercially viable in hip-hop as Black Genius, the same fate that had already befallen jazz and soul in the eighties.’

Very much at ease with the central fact of Anglophone pop music’s evolution, which is that the vast preponderance of meaningful artistic advances have originated in the creativity of black people, Tate was perfectly placed to highlight the innumerable acts of erasure which have been the punctuation points in rock’s official histories. He did this with the élan of the outnumbered Israelites in Solomon and Sheba, using highly polished shields to reflect the sun into the eyes of a vast advancing Egyptian army. Consider the inexorable momentum of this paragraph from his superb essay on Chuck Berry:

‘Berry’s greatest innovation was the entrepreneurially driven rhythmic logic that led him to blend the 4/4 of boogie-woogie with the 2/4 of hoedown hillbilly music while elocuting his lyrics in a timbre designed to attract (and then confuse) the country and western crowds who showed up to his dances on the side of the tracks and the Mississippi River. That he did this during Jim Crow nee American apartheid’s brutally slow wane was equally rad. As Berry found out when he was booked by the country and western promoters on the basis of ‘Maybellene’ and then told there was no way in hell he’d be allowed to perform when they saw his face at the door. Heard him knocking but Oh No No No neither he nor nobody looking like him could come in.’

I also love Tate’s response to seeing Eminem (about whose talent he is very complimentary elsewhere) described on the cover of hip-hop magazines as ‘the greatest living rapper’, laughing at ‘the impulse to crown any white man who takes a Black art form to the bank, to mo’ money than Shine ever seen, as the greatest who ever lived. Fred Astaire, Benny Goodman, Elvis, Eric Clapton, Larry Bird, take your pick.’ The title of Tate’s 2003 book Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture seems to say it all here.

Whatever your personal low-point of white male entitlement in music writing, no-one could deny that competition is plentiful. The clunkily hubristic horrors of Nick Kent’s memoir, the very existence of the Ewan McGregor journalist character in that terrible Miles Davis film, Clinton Heylin presuming to tell Bob Dylan about himself, the racist Melody Maker cover that depicted Craig David on the toilet, Geoff Dyer’s breezy assertion in the afterword to But Beautiful that there is ‘little first rate writing on jazz’… once you start on this rap-sheet, the number of other offences to be taken into consideration spirals off into infinity. But for anyone driven by such manifestations of ill-informed prejudice and egotistical bad faith to wish that, pace Travis Bickle, ‘Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets’, Greg Tate’s writing was that rain.