Greg Tate, a journalist and critic whose articles for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and other publications starting in the 1980s helped elevate hip-hop and street art to the same plane as jazz and Abstract Expressionism, died on Tuesday in New York City.
Mr. Tate exploded onto the New York cultural scene in the early 1980s, soon after graduating from Howard University, when he began contributing freelance music reviews to The Voice.
New York at the time was an ebullient chaos of cultures, its downtown scene populated by street artists, struggling writers, disco D.J.s and punk rockers living in cheap apartments and crowding into clubs like Paradise Garage and CBGB.
His tastes varied widely, as did his style; his whirlwind sentences might string together pop culture, French literary theory and the latest slang.
He quickly graduated from reviews to cultural criticism.
Mr. Tate could be both generous and exacting: He praised Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as one of the best albums ever made but called the follow-up, “Bad,” one of the worst.
But he was less interested in castigation than in celebration and exploration.
Mr. Tate’s first book, “Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America,” was published in 1993.
Some critics like to remain aloof from their subjects; not Mr. Tate.
He wrote as both a music fan and a musician; he played guitar, and in 1999 he formed Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, a genre-blending band of indeterminate size.
He left The Voice in 2005, became a visiting professor at Brown and Columbia and wrote a series of books, including a sequel to “Flyboy” and a critical assessment of Jimi Hendrix.
“When you’re younger, it’s all about expressionism, it’s all about trying to make as much noise as possible,” he told The L.A.
Both his parents, Charles and Florence Tate, were active in the city’s civil rights movement as members of the Congress of Racial Equality, and their home served as a gathering place for fellow organizers.
In an interview, she remembered Greg coming to her apartment to listen to records and grilling her about music, art and literature.
He studied journalism and film at Howard, where he also hosted a radio show and began trying his hand at music criticism.
Just before moving to New York permanently, Mr. Tate struck up a friendship with Arthur Jafa, another Howard student, who was at the beginning of his own illustrious career as a video artist.
On another occasion, Mr. Jafa joined Mr. Tate for an event in Minneapolis, where they ended up talking for 10 hours, becoming a sort of accidental performance art.