Greg Tate Gardening
Author: Charles Blass Issue: 2022-08-03
Greg Tate Gardening
by charles blass
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
yo plex…
the great Greg Tate passed onward and outward last December. he was a friend, mentor and collaborator over many years. last spring he also passed through a couple of cicolab sessions on “jazz patterns” which abruptly morphed into a deep inquiry on race.
i wrote some stuff when he passed, need to assemble and shape —
in the meantime, a number of celebratory events have been emerging along with a continuing stream of written tributes like this excellent one, Our Man Tate: A Living Memoriam, just out by another friend, Darrell M. McNeill. his excerpts from Greg’s prescient 1986 essay are offered for the Plex community:
My mission is clear. The future of Black culture depends that this generation brings forth a worldly-wise and stoopidfresh intelligentsia of radical bups who can get as ign’ant as James Brown with their Wangs [computers] and stay in the Black. Give me such an army and we’ll be talking total cultural Black rule by the time the ecosystem collapses, SDI bottoms out Fort Knox, the Aryan Brotherhood is officially in the White House, and Wall Street is on the moon.Somewhere along the road to probable madness or a meaningful life, I decided that what black culture needs is a popular poststructuralism — accessible writing bent on deconstructing the whole of black culture. Anybody who’s read Harold Cruse’s scathing dissection of black leadership, ‘The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,’ knows his argument that each generation of black leaders has failed from an inability to conceive black liberation totally and systemically. Meaning they failed to develop agendas that fused protest and reform politics with self-help economics, sophisticated cultural critiques, and a Marxian take on the political economy of capitalism. Twenty years later, the void Cruse railed against remains. If you think I’m going to try to fill it, you got another think coming. I’m bold, but I ain’t that bad. This whatchamajiggy here is about how black aestheticians need to develop a coherent criticism to communicate the complexities of our culture. There’s no periodical on black cultural phenomena equivalent to The Village Voice or Artforum, no publication that provides journalism on black visual art, philosophy, politics, economics, media, literature, linguistics, psychology, sexuality, spirituality, and pop culture. Though there are certainly black editors, journalists, and academics capable of producing such a journal, the disintegration of the black cultural nationalist movement and the braindrain of black intellectuals to white institutions have destroyed the vociferous public dialogue that used to exist between them. Consider this my little shot at opening it up again.– Greg Tate, “Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke: Coming Age Of The Post-Nationalist Black Aesthetic,” Village Voice, December 9, 1986
please also enjoy the program i pulled together the same week he passed, focusing on (among other topics) Greg’s musical outfit of stellar misfits Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber (with whom i collaborated). the post also contains a bunch of further resources.
GTBS Gumbo: Greg Tate & Burnt Sugar Arkestra 20211209 Sun Radio Celebration [6.75 hours] #thebigplayback (lovevolv.org)
cb
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