Writer, musician and producer Greg Tate’s studious prose and inspired hollers can leave one regenerated but also a little deflated.
Regenerated because Tate uses the guise of a mere writer to rewire the process of historicisation, and deflated because, after Tate, all else will have to return to the drawing board to figure out this elusive shit termed “style”.
Biters abound and even Tate himself has had to reconfigure his writing style, hence his stylistic journey from Flyboy in the Buttermilk to Flyboy 2.
Since the single biggest cultural event that stands between the two books is, arguably, the passing of the king, Michael Jackson (bye Obama!), let’s look at how Tate handles the gloved one in his essays in both books.
Soon after the death of Michael Jackson, I attended the funeral of a friend. While the preacher merely read him his rites, his lifelong clique of buddies hung his dirty laundry to dry on the pulpit. In their defence, the men said their duty was not to speak ill of the dead but rather to keep it real with the living.
In the metaphysical distance between Flyboy in the Buttermilk (or Flyboy 1 for this review) and Flyboy 2, Tate reprises this concept, speaking ill of the living, and later, keeping it real with the dead.
Writing in Flyboy 1 in 1987 about the improbable, self-mutilative leap mirrored by the aesthetic decline between Thriller and Bad, Tate says: “To fully appreciate the sickness of Jackson’s savaging of his African physiognomy you have to recall that back when he wore the face he was born with, black folk thought he was the prettiest thing since sliced sushi.”
Tate’s brutal words pre-empted Jackson’s death by 22 years and are only tempered by the fact that Jackson was pretty much soulless from then on.
Just as black people so loved Jackson, in his Flyboy 2 obituary Tate pities the king – but only in so far as he is The Man in Our Mirror, perhaps the one deemed worthy to carry the ironic burden of irremovable blackness.
“Black Americans are inherently and even literally ‘damaged goods’, a people whose central struggle has been overcoming the nonperson status we got stamped and stomped into us during slavery and post-Reconstruction and resonates even now … ” Tate writes in The Man in Our Mirror obituary in Flyboy 2. While everybody else was tiptoeing around Jackson’s self-loathing corpse, Tate was one of the few critics who addressed Jackson’s legacy in totality, even in death.
But with all the unflinching critique that lands at Jackson’s door, Tate’s mission is not to play ultimate judge, but to point out that Jackson’s transmogrification was (as he writes in Flyboy 1) emblematic of “the carpetbagging side of black advancement in the affirmative action era.” In other words, Michael was not alone. He was merely the most visible symbol of the idea of tomming.
Through much of Flyboy 2, Tate is in hyperintuitive mode, mirroring from all angles and performing magic tricks with shards of light to illuminate infinite blackness anew.
Flyboy 1’s title prince is street artist turned toast of Gotham, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat, co-opted by the art world’s white gatekeepers to an early death as “the most financially successful black visual artist in history”, is the perfect conduit for Tate’s ideas about black artists working in the avant-garde tradition. He is the muse Tate uses as a pivot to weave under and up the crowded lane of futurism, freeing himself up for an easy dunk in the face of white supremacy.
To Basquiat, who illuminates Tate’s ideas about a blackness that cannot be essentialised, he ascribes nothing short of griot status. Referencing 19th-century black leader, author and orator Frederick Douglass, Tate charges Basquiat as that “star-crossed figure on the American scene forever charged with explaining Black folks to white folks and with explaining Black people themselves – often from the perspective of a distance refracted by double alienation.”
If one is to read Flyboy 1 and 2 sequentially, the act of placing the title essay towards the end of Flyboy 1 means one can see its conceptual clarity spill over into Flyboy 2.
In a defence of rapper and producer Ice Cube, for example, Tate again draws on the idea of the griot, positing Cube’s uncensored, technicolour narratives as the tradition of “the outcast who records and recites the tribe’s history no matter how unsettling the tale” as you would see it “in the tradition of hard-boiled crime writers like Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson”.
In the period between the two books, one can surmise that Tate got sharper and less showy. Instead of frequent bouts of brilliance, Tate sharpened a more consistent and reflective tone that rendered his sprawling ideas and profiles a worthy reflection on his own craft.
His essay on Brooklyn street dancer Storyboard P seems to point to this: “At moments of revolution in artistic form, innovation frequently involves discarding flashy displays of technique. The reduction of ostentatious moves in favour of subtler ones is often read as laziness or limited ability. Remember how long Thelonious Monk languished under that now laughable misperception in jazz, and you’ll dig immediately where Story is coming from.”
Whereas one could legitimately argue that women featured marginally in Tate’s initial vision of futurism, as presented in Flyboy 1, Flyboy 2 goes a long way towards reforming this. But Tate lessens the potency of his iconoclastic gaze by compartmentalising his chapters according to gender lines.
The ode to black lesbians, Born to Dyke…, may come across as patronising to some sisters because there are lines in which Tate seems to be working out his complicated masculine angst by proxy. But there is also evidence of a tireless aesthete unafraid to tackle a tricky subject with finesse.
Tate also does not shy away from addressing misogyny in hip-hop. He describes the Wu song A Better Tomorrow by comparing it with the blaxploitation flick The Mack. “It’s like in The Mack, where the pimp Goldie gets mad at the white man for selling heroin to the little brothers but got no problem with sistas hooking until they drop.”
What Flyboy 1 and 2 show is that Tate has come a long way in the study of this, the feared black planet and, in so doing, came out a more skilful, more humble man. What his style won’t let me forget is this: we are simultaneously in command of this world, and others.
Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader will be launched on September 10 at Keleketla!Library, in the King Kong building in Troyeville, Johannesburg