WORD: LIFE Panel | FLYBOY UNBOUND The Life and Significance of Greg Tate

Moderator:
Syreeta Gates
Panelists:
Nelson George
dream hampton
Joan Morgan
Mark Anthony Neal
Context:
Cultural critic and journalist Greg Tate was a creative giant, a renaissance man whose impact cannot be contained by any one of the many areas where his impact was felt, from journalism to music to art to the vibrant community he cultivated. Tate’s early writing in the Village Voice helped legitimize hip hop criticism as on par with any other type of arts criticism. But while hip hop was a love of his and his hip hop criticism is legendary, he was not limited to it, often ruminating on all aspects of Black life and politics, through essays, lectures and in his brilliant Facebook posts.
This panel discussion will celebrate the critic and his work as Columbia Journalism School and Critical Minded inaugurate a scholarship in his honor to support an arts journalism student.
Planned in collaboration with Tate’s family, this panel includes four of Tate’s dear friends and collaborators: Nelson George, a filmmaker, writer and a godfather of hip hop journalism alongside Tate, dream hampton, an award-winning filmmaker and writer; Joan Morgan, cultural critic and author of “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost” and Mark Anthony Neal, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor, and Chair of the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke.
Moderating the discussion will be Syreeta Gates, a hip hop archivist and founder of The Gates Preserve, a multimedia company that preserves and archives hip hop. Its motto: “archiving is a statement of value.”
Sample Credits:
Greg Tate, Public Enemy: The Devil Made ‘Em Do It (Review: The Village Voice, 1988)
Greg Tate, Flyboy In The Buttermilk: Essays On Contemporary America (Book: Square, 2015)
Hua Hsu, The Critic Who Convinced Me That Criticism Could Be Art (Article: The New Yorker, 2016)
Bonus Tracks:
The Gates Preserve, Greg Tate Was Loved (Website: gregtatewasloved.com, 2022)
Michael Gonzales, A Textual Meditation on Greg Tate (Article: Lit Hub, 2021)
Michael Gonzales, Why Greg Tate Matters (Article: Blackadelic Pop, 2007)
Dean Van Nguyen, How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip Hop Into a Literary Movement (Article: Pitchfork, 2018)