There are many reasons to pick up Greg Tate’s recently-reissued Flyboy in the Buttermilk, beginning with the fact that it’s a triumphant, wide-ranging collection of nonfiction and cultural commentary. Add in the presence of introductions by both Questlove and Hanif Abdurraqib, each of whom does an excellent job of pointing out why Tate’s work mattered when at the time it was written and continues to matter, and you have the makings of a classic returning to print.
It’s under bittersweet circumstances: Tate died five years ago at the age of 64, news that shocked me when I heard it at the time. (I didn’t know him personally, but I’d heard him speak at a number of events over the years; he seemed like a staunch and everlasting presence in critical and cultural circles.) His work remains, along with a posthumous Pulitzer.
In his introduction, Abdurraqib makes a compelling argument about one of the qualities for which Tate’s work stands out:
What I believe many get wrong now, today, even the steadfast critic, the person with a careful eye turned toward distaste and frustrations, is that hating for the sake of hating is not without its pleasures, but it most commonly makes for a good porch conversation, and less of a good page conversation.
In other words, Abdurraqib observes, Tate wrote with care and empathy, even when he was criticizing a given artist. It’s a quality well worth keeping in mind, distilled neatly by Abdurraqub in his introduction and embodied through the writings of Tate collected here.
The other lesson that I took from Flyboy in the Buttermilk is from the example that Tate set, which is to say, a willingness to reference nearly everything while making a given argument. When writing about Miles Davis’s electric period, Tate compares Bitches Brew to the fiction of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “at once a thought process, a textual language, and a way of reordering tradition and myth unto itself.”
In the first five sentences of 1988’s “Diary of a Bug,” readers will find references to Rakim, Greil Marcus, Roland Barthes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; later in the same work, Pee-Wee Herman, Max Roach, Pablo Picasso, and Ice-T also make appearances. Is it virtuosic to cite such a wide range of artists? Sure — but the argument he makes here is cohesive and resonant. And if there’s a lesson to take away here, it’s that drawing in points of reference from all over can make a convincing argument even stronger. This collection is subtitled “Essays on Contemporary America,” and the sense that any subject is up for discussion runs throughout the book.
Flyboy in the Buttermilk also has the quality that the best writing about art has: it sent me down all manner of rabbit holes while (and after) reading it. Here’s Tate on guitarist Pete Cosey, best known for his work with Miles Davis:
On Dark Magus Cosey’s guitar leads are a cross between Miles, backlooped Hendrix, and Trane’s sheets-of-sound. On Pangea and Agharta his lines sizzle into exotic scales distorted to run subterranean channels while orderly tracking to thematic resolution.
I mean: you read that and not want to immediately listen to everything Cosey ever recorded! Which is how I ended up on Bandcamp, checking out (and subsequently purchasing) the 2000 album Fisherman’s.com, which features Cosey alongside Akira Sakata, Bill Laswell, and Hamid Drake. Weird title, maybe, but the music heard on it is a top-notch recording from four outstanding musicians. And that, too, is something reading Tate can remind us: that seeking out something new can be eminently rewarding, again and again.
***
Flyboy In the Buttermilk
by Greg Tate
AUWA; 368 p.