Greg Tate

A collection of essays on contemporary popular culture notes how white teens are emulating and idealizing African-American choices in dress, music, and role models, in a volume that includes contributions by Carl Hancock-Rux and Jonathan Lethem. Reprint.

What White People are Taking from Black Culture

Everything But the Burden

Village Voice columnist Greg Tate offers essays and tales of American music and culture, from Be-Bop to Hip-Hop. He examines music, books, newspaper reporting, and more to explore such issues as racism, poverty, sexism, homophobia, and political and economic injustices from a black point of view.

Essays on Contemporary America

Flyboy in the Buttermilk

Liz Munsell

How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat's works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries--and sometimes collaborators--A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture. Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat's work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat's extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city.

Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation

Writing the Future

Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America

White kids from the ’burbs are throwing up gang signs. The 2001 Grammy winner for best rap artist was as white as rice. And blond-haired sorority sisters are sporting FUBU gear. What is going on in American culture that’s giving our nation a racial-identity crisis? Following the trail blazed by Norman Mailer’s controversial essay “The White Negro,” Everything but the Burden brings together voices from music, popular culture, the literary world, and the media speaking about how from Brooklyn to the Badlands white people are co-opting black styles of music, dance, dress, and slang. In this collection, the essayists examine how whites seem to be taking on, as editor Greg Tate’s mother used to tell him, “everything but the burden”–from fetishizing black athletes to spinning the ghetto lifestyle into a glamorous commodity. Is this a way of shaking off the fear of the unknown? A flattering indicator of appreciation? Or is it a more complicated cultural exchange? The pieces in Everything but the Burden explore the line between hero-worship and paternalism. Among the book’s twelve essays are Vernon Reid’s “Steely Dan Understood as the Apotheosis of ‘The White Negro,’” Carl Hancock Rux’s “The Beats: America’s First ‘Wiggas,’” and Greg Tate’s own introductory essay “Nigs ’R Us.” Other contributors include: Hilton Als, Beth Coleman, Tony Green, Robin Kelley, Arthur Jafa, Gary Dauphin, Michaela Angela Davis, dream hampton, and Manthia diAwara.

What White People Are Taking from Black Culture

Michael Betancourt

Isolde Brielmaier

José Parlá

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

José Parlá (born 1973) derives his art from the accretions and damage of city walls, and the record they supply of neighborhood character and local history. To these collectively authored public surfaces, Parlá brings a consciousness of art history, and the transformations of graffiti traditions dating back to ancient Rome by painters such as Twombly, Basquiat and Kiefer. His mixed media works sometimes employ fresco techniques and include acrylic, oil paints, plaster, posters used as collage, homemade inks and enamel spray paint. Parlá's archeological works celebrate the chronicles of the urban fabric as a diary: he writes, "as my works evolved, be it paintings, signatures, or even the documentation of these early ephemeral artworks throughout city walls, the works took on the nature of personal journals based on empirical experiences." This volume surveys his two-decade oeuvre.

Walls, Diaries, and Paintings

Martin Dixon

Presents an insider's view of the African American motorcycle clubs in New York City.

New York City's Black Bikers

Brooklyn Kings

Ashley Kahn

Ron Carter

Robin D. G. Kelley

Clark Terry

Lenny White

Here is the illustrated history of Miles Davis, the worldâ€™s most popular jazz trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and musical visionary. Davis is one of the most innovative, influential, and respected figures in the history of music. Heâ€™s been at the forefront of bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion, and remains the favorite and best-selling jazz artist ever, beloved worldwide. Heâ€™s also a fascinating characterâ€”moody, dangerous, brilliant. His story is phenomenal, including tempestous relationships with movie stars, heroin addictions, police busts, and more; connections with other jazz greats like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, John McLaughlin, and many others; and later fusion ventures that outraged the worlds of jazz and rock. Written by an all-star team, including Sonny Rollins, Bill Cosby, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Clark Terry, Lenny White, Greg Tate, Ashley Kahn, Robin D. G. Kelley, Francis Davis, George Wein, Vincent BessiÃ¨res, Gerald Early, Nate Chinen, Nalini Jones, Dave Liebman, Garth Cartwright, and more.

The Complete Illustrated History

Miles Davis

Michael Cuscuna

Richard Seidel

"...5,000 word essay by journalist-author-producer-musician Greg Tate ; producers' notes by Michael Cuscuna and Richard Seidel...and Lenny White interview by author Ashley Kahn. The book features Mati Klarwein's painting Zonked (a psychedelic portrait of Miles Davis' wife, Betty, which also encodes a profile of Miles) on its cover, plus dozens of rare, unpublished photographs and record label memos."--Sell sheet.

Bitches Brew

Christoph Heinrich

Elizabeth Alexander

"Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze brings together nearly thirty paintings made between 2013 and 2018 by Jordan Casteel, including examples from Brothers, Visible Man, Nights in Harlem, and her subway Subway series. By transforming her photographs into larger-than-life portraits with subtle shifts in light, bold colors, and gestural brushwork, Casteel reveals individuals and atmospheres that often go unnoticed"--

Returning the Gaze

Jordan Casteel

Jessica Morgan

Robert Storr

Ellen Gallagher

Brian "B+" Cross

Dave Tompkins

Ghostnotes: Music of the Unplayed is an extended photo essay with more than two hundred images that represent a mid-career retrospective of B+’s photography of hip-hop music and its influences. Taking its name from the unplayed sounds that exist between beats in a rhythm, the book creates a visual music, putting photos next to each other to evoke unseen images and create new histories. Like a DJ seamlessly overlapping and entangling disparate musics, Cross brings together LA Black Arts poetry and Jamaican dub, Brazilian samba and Ethiopian jazz, Cuban timba and Colombian cumbia. He links vendors of rare vinyl with iconic studio wizards, ranging from J Dilla and Brian Wilson to Leon Ware and George Clinton, David Axelrod to Shuggie Otis, Bill Withers to Ras Kass, Biggie Smalls to Timmy Thomas, DJ Shadow to Eugene McDaniels, and DJ Quik to Madlib. In this unique photographic mix tape, an extraordinary web of associations becomes apparent, revealing connections among people, cultures, and their creations.

Music of the Unplayed

Ghostnotes

Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America.

The Greg Tate Reader

Flyboy 2

Dick Hebdige

Whitney Museum of American Art

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Richard Marshall

Robert Farris Thompson

Menil Collection (Houston, Tex.)

Klaus Kertess

Des Moines Art Center

Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

Rene Ricard

Complete survey of the work of JeanMichel Basquiat with more than 270 illustrations.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York October 23, 1992 - February 14, 1993; The Menil Collection, Houston March 11 - May 9, 1993; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa May 22 - August 15, 1993; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama November 18, 1993 - January 9, 1994

Greg Tate

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