One of the New York Times pop-casts, your freaky-deak family reunion of music news and criticism,

I'm your host John Garamonica.

Back in December, we lost Greg Tate.

Greg was a critic for the village voice in the 1980s and 1990s, wrote for vibe extensively.

There's an anthology of his early work called Flyboy in the Buttermilk that is one of

the most meaningful books of criticism certainly that I have ever read, and his work has just

had a tremendous and outsized impact on loads of young writers, but also artists, filmmakers,

musicians, and beyond.

Frankly, it's hard to overstate how powerful Tate's work was, and the man had a tremendous

facility with language and incredible musicality with the way that he composed sentences.

You often felt like you were inside the work of art, the song, the album, the film.

You felt like you were inside the thing when you were living inside of Tate's piece about

it, but what's more, Greg really believed in the power of great criticism and understood

that you can advocate for a work of art, you can advocate for a musician, a filmmaker,

but really you're advocating for the ability to assess and analyze and think hard and

also critique with love that same thing.

It was all cyclical, it was all part of the same system.

When Tate passed, there was a tremendous outpouring of support online, obviously a great amount

of tributes written, including one by me, felt like the very least that I could do, and

it's been on my mind that I wanted to find ways to do more, to spread the Greg gospel

kind of as widely as possible.

One thing that I was able to do is I had put out a call on Twitter and I said if there's

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