It’s early in Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk that you realize Tate had assumed the responsibility of helping Black folks recognize what was possible for them in this world. In the hands of another, a tonal overture like this would veer, inevitably, into the realm of arrogance. But with Tate, that thorny assuredness was powered by a love for the Black person scanning the words on the other side of the page. Three paragraphs into the seventh essay in the 1992 collection Stagolee versus the Proper Negro (a brilliant exploration on the crossover appeal of Eddie Murphy, Wynton Marsalis, and Prince), he muses on the fully assimilated status of Black people in America. Tate pulls the curtain up on symbolic victories and the pyrrhic equality boasted when the “best of us” get accepted into white society, no matter what was lost to earn that embrace. “Which is to say, we really ain’t come much farther than those days when a black man had to have a PhD to get a job in the Post Office. (Leading me to say that equality will arrive the day brothers and sisters can get over by being as mediocre as their white counterparts.)” he wrote in the Village Voice in 1984.
In the years since Tate’s passing in December 2021, the legacy of his fearless criticism—both in explaining his dissatisfaction and showing his admiration for Black music and culture—had crystallized. The way that it seemed he had no choice but to grab you by the shoulders and shake you awake, spitting game like he was the coolest rapper alive in order to break through the buildup in your ears. There was a beauty to the unabashed ways Tate would try to learn you about the ways Black music and its acolytes fit into the world. And as a version of the saying goes, curiosity begets curiosity, with Tate’s visions for the heights we could reach propelling you to follow him to those outer limits.
Hanif Abdurraqib feels particularly rooted in Tate’s lineage of generous, genuine curiosity. The poet and writer was asked by Tate’s family to write the introduction for the 2026 re-publishing of Flyboy in the Buttermilk, which had long been out of print and could run you $100 on the used book market if you weren’t careful. “I think Tate was someone who was very invested and involved in my work early on, and remained so,” Abdurraqib tells me over Zoom. “And I was someone who thought of him and looked at him as kind of a mentor, a north star.” For Abdurraqib, it was the easiest yes he’s uttered in a long time. Our talk about Tate and his legacy has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Flyboy has been out for decades now, but how did the opportunity to be a part of the re-release and write the new introduction come about?
The family asked me. I think Tate is someone who was very invested and involved in my work early on, and remained so. And I was someone who thought of him and looked at him as kind of a mentor, a north star. In the years since after his passing, I had been involved in a couple things: I had written to the Pulitzer Committee to get him the posthumous Pulitzer that he got in the press, and the family reached out and asked if I would write an intro to the book. And it was the easiest yes possible.
What type of honor is it to be part of a legacy piece of his writing and cultural existence?
Well, I mean, it’s an honor, but it’s also I think it charges us with a real responsibility. I say us because I think anyone who sits at the feet of this monumental work, not just the whole of Flyboy, but anything he’s created, anyone who sits at the feet of that and aspires to the clarity and rigor and actual love. You know, I talk a lot about how Tate’s deep affection for black people sometimes rubbed up against his dissatisfaction, which is somewhere some of his best writing came from. I think about like that Public Enemy piece. But anyone who kind of sits at the feet of this work and attempts to reach for it, you’re charging yourself with a real responsibility. Lineage is something that I believe none of us have to ask permission to place ourselves in an existing lineage. However, once we do that as writers or artists or anyone who creates things, I think it’s worth taking that responsibility seriously and operating as though you are no longer writing alone. You are writing alongside someone else who, if you’re lucky, is looking over your shoulder and guiding you in ways that you otherwise would not be guided. And so, I mean, it’s an honor, of course. But what I think about it as is something that is entirely less about me, the individual, and more about the responsibility that it charges with my work. That I hope continues to contribute to a broader collective.
And is there any way to overrate the amount of strength that comes from being part of that type of lineage? Like, once you buy in and do it wholeheartedly, is there any way to think about the impact on how you write or go about the work?
Well, you’re right. I mean, there’s no way to overrate it for me, and I will say, of course, it impacts how I go about the work. But when I think about Tate and I think about what I take from being in lineage with him, is it actually impacts how I go about the world. I think Tate was so good to writers who were not perhaps in the position that he was in, writers who were less revered or less decorated. Even though Tate was not very materially decorated in his life, he was still decorated through way of just like a deep respect within the community, and he treated those writers as equals, and that to me is a requirement. That’s a requirement of my approach. Because like when I had like one poetry book out, the first book was a poetry book. I had one poetry book out, and like a few essays scattered about the internet, it was a lot of older writers who were OGs to me who treated me like I was someone who was a direct peer of theirs. And so, I think another part of being in that lineage that can’t be overstated is that if we’re lucky, and if we’re like actually selfless about this work and doing it for the right reasons, if we’re not doing it for accolades, and we’re not doing it for, you know, whatever material success might wait for us. And if we’re not doing it for any kind of attempt at superiority in lieu of curiosity, then I think we can build upon and expand a lineage that includes our living ancestors, as well as the ones who have passed.
And thinking about that, do you feel that responsibility in the same way that Tate and other people you consider mentors to continue that, “hey, I’m looking over your shoulder,” for younger creators? How much does an ideal like that build into how you move throughout the world as a public intellectual?
Yeah, yeah, it’s funny because I just got off another interview like yesterday where I was like,”Man, the term public intellectual always makes me shrink a bit because I don’t understand it.” ... I think I’ve always said that it’s important for me to remain more curious about others than I can ever be about myself. And that is not just good for the work on the page; it’s good for the work in the world, individual and community work and collective work. And that means that I’m generally so open to and interested in what someone else is doing. Not even on some shit where it’s like I feel like I am in competition, and so I got to clock every movement. It’s because I am aware of the fact that what I know well and understand well, is a fraction of what exists. You know what I mean? Like I think about someone, you know, a writer. There are many writers I love, and I don’t mean to single out just one. But you know, I love a writer like Lawrence Burney, for example. You know his stuff?
Yeah! He’s from Baltimore, my family’s from Baltimore, and I talked to him for his book, which was very lovely to do. Lawrence is the best.
Lawrence is one of the ones, you know? What I love about Lawrence is he’s someone who has such a hyper-specific depth of knowledge that I just am not gonna have access to. I don’t have it, and it doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in it. It’s that when I read Lawrence’s work or when I talk to him, I’m like, “Man, you’ve got a very specific point of view, and you kind of got it on lock.” You know what I mean? What I’m saying is that kind of lineage making and community building that doesn’t center competition means that I look at someone like Lawrence, and I don’t feel threatened by the knowledge that he has. I feel eager to read him for years and years and years to come, and if I could help in any way to further and prolong that career, I’m gonna do it. Because it’s not just good for him; it’s good for me as someone who wants to continue to immerse myself in this very specific depth of knowledge that he has. That I also feel like he articulates better than anyone else. And there are a lot of writers like that. There are a lot of writers younger than me, or by younger, I don’t even mean in terms of age. I mean in terms of perhaps the amount of publications, or younger in career. To build a world where we all can thrive equitably means that I get to immerse myself in whatever work you have to come, and I get to keep learning from you. And to me, that’s a great benefit, and I think that’s an important thing that Tate was reaching for. It wasn’t just like, “I want my people to come up.” It was like, if you come up alongside me and we all come up together, we can keep pushing each other to get collectively better.”
And what was that fraction of the art form, writing, criticism that kept bringing you back to Tate? The thing that you thought he did that really grabbed you and made you keep coming back?
Well, I mean, there’s two answers because you’re talking about keep coming back. But I will say the piece that first grabbed me and pulled me in was this piece called “Tear the Roof off Jungleland,” which is about Bruce Springsteen. And I love Bruce Springsteen, like Bruce Springsteen’s one of the most important artists in my life, and I read this piece when I was young. I mean, like 15-16. At that point it was like 15 years old. You know, the piece came out in the 80s, and what was fascinating to me about that piece, especially if you’re talking about. Lineage is that he was placing Springsteen in a lineage with James Brown, and I had never seen anyone do that. Even though spiritually and inherently, I knew that was true because if you watch videos of Springsteen, particularly in the late 70s and early 80s, he’s just kind of mimicking the James Brown stage performance, the cape on the shoulders, and you know all the whole thing. I was like, “Oh, this person maybe understands something that I had inherently known but never seen spoken,” and to see it spoken by a black critic. I was like, you know, “This is what I need.”
But what kept me coming back is the way that he was so fearless, and I know I keep talking about this thing, but he was so fearless in his expressions of dissatisfaction. If he didn’t fuck with something, he was plain about it, and he would look directly, or the writing would look directly, at a source of dissatisfaction, be it an artist, an album, a film, and say, I wanted more out of this, and I’m not giving up. I hope I can get it. I hope I can get them more. And I think that is sometimes how I formed my entire base of criticism. My entire base of criticism was saying: I want to hold the things I love to a strict account. I want to hold the things I love to account with real rigor and care and curiosity, not because I believe in a pass-fail binary, but because I would like the things I love to remain the things I love. And when they falter, when those things falter off that path. I’m going to be there to say, “What can we do to nudge you back? How can we nudge you back?” This is a long answer, but you know what’s been heartbreaking for me, and maybe for you, and a lot of people who grew up with Hip-hop, is that we’re seeing all some of our OGs. I mean, Dr. Dre was kind of trash before this, but like, let’s think about like Dre and Timbo and Rick Rubin. All these OGs are being like, you know what? Everyone should use AI because AI is so great. And that the reason that’s been disheartening for me, I think, is not because I love these dudes. I mean, of course, I’m 40. I’m in my early 40s. So, like, I grew up on the ‘Chronic,’ and I grew up during the Golden Era of Timbaland production, and I love some Rick Rubin beats or whatever, and I love some of those albums he’s done. I love the Johnny Cash records, but these aren’t like my favorite producers of all time. However, what it’s saying is, we have made our money, and now we’re selling a shortcut to a younger generation to convince them to be less creative and less rigorous, and that is devastating to me. The AI of it all is too, sure, but what is actually devastating is you have people saying, “I’m going to sell you a way to be less creative instead of selling you a way to challenge yourself.” And what I’m saying, I guess, about the work of Tate is that it challenged me because of how I saw it challenge other people, and that was worthwhile.
What can you say about the importance of the clarity for whom Tate was writing for? He believed Black music, life, and criticism could be one thing, but that also meant trusting the audience with that same weight.
Well, you know the reason I was so drawn to that Springsteen piece when I first read it, is the first line is “Where all my Negroes at?” Because he was watching a Springsteen show at I think MSG, and he was like, “Why ain’t there no black folks here?” And really one of the early pieces in my career that got a lot of attention is kind of cribbing, it’s borrowing from from that. It’s this piece I wrote about seeing Springsteen in having the same kind of, “Where all the black folks at”—though my conclusion was different than Tate’s. But what I loved about his work was that it was so dependent on an attempt to seek out the black people who are not in the room and to bring them closer. You have to think about it. I came up writing zines, writing for zines, right? I came up. I’m gonna maybe date myself, even though zines are popping again. You know that’s a blessing. But when I came up, I came up on these on punk scenes and hardcore scenes in the Midwest that in my time, because I was rolling with like black punks, so like those scenes were black:, Detroit especially, Indiana, Dayton. and I was writing in zines, and. My job essentially was to deliver the word of what I had been seeing to people who were not there, and I used Tate as a framework for that. In my early days—this had to be like pre-blog era for me, so 2008, ‘07, ‘08, ‘09, Before I got real heavy in the blogs and shit, and I was using Tate as a framework, because so much of what he was saying is, I know there are some black people in the world who might love this and just are missing it for whatever reason.
They may be missing it, and I don’t want to judge them for missing it. I would like instead to tell them, “Where y’all at? You’re missing something you might love.” And that’s kind of been a guiding light for me too. And so, he was playing about the audience, but he also saw, heard, and felt black music everywhere. Not to go back to that Springsteen piece, but like, I can’t overstate how revolutionary it was for my thinking. There was something inherent. And again, I grew up loving Springsteen and watching Springsteen. And I remember thinking, even as a young consumer of enjoying his music, like there’s something inherently black about this, the performance of the that’s happening on stage, and to see it articulated by another black person was to afford me to offer me back a level of sanity—and that’s a gift too. To see black music everywhere and hear it everywhere and feel it everywhere because it is everywhere, is to also and to write about it as such. I think it is to return some sense of sanity to the black people who also see and hear and feel black music everywhere, because it is.
One of the pieces that immediately came to mind even as you’re saying that is the Sunny Ade profile. Where he’s following the band, and you can see him almost being a conduit for the audience having his own doubts on African music and its relation to African Americans, then deconstructing that.
Yeah, I think he was maybe the second best writer I’ve ever, or one of the two best, because Lester Bangs was so good at that. And it felt like he was an extension of [the idea that] our lineage comes from many places, and I don’t actually know. I know Tate read Lester Bangs and knew, you know, and all that, but you know, I think about him and Lester Bangs when I think of that level of the skepticism of a new audience member, but the clarity of a critic.
And I think you know Lester Bangs has this massive profile on the Clash, when the Clash first came to America, or I think he went overseas with them, and then they came to America. But nonetheless, it’s this long thing. It’s maybe his greatest profile, and why that profile works is because halfway through he’s like, “I actually don’t know if I believe this shit at all.” Like, I actually don’t know if I believe what they’re selling me at all. And that’s on the page. You know what I mean? He’s like, “but I’m willing to be compelled by what they’re offering. I need to see more,” and I think that Tate has that in him too. This idea of the skepticism does not come from a place of not wanting to believe. Skepticism comes from a place of perhaps wanting to believe so much that you actually cannot believe what’s already in front of you, and so I love that. I love that about his work.
It’s interesting because it feels as though his criticism is taking a different shape—where he’ll abandon straight formal aesthetic criticism, and bring in personal context and bring in emotional heft. As though he’s got his foot on the gas pedal.
Yeah.
In your mind, is it still pure criticism, or is it something else?
It’s still criticism because it’s still following the tenets of what I think criticism is, which is looking at something in translating and transforming.
Which I think still has the same effect, in my mind.
Oh, of course. Yeah. Well, at least one would hope. You know what I mean? I think I think on the page it definitely still has the same effect. I think to the reader they might be taking in something different, but I do think on the page it is summoning the same effect with a question.
I think about the idea about Tate being cool, because I read a lot of interviews and a lot of others’ essays about it feeling like he was rapping to you. Not in a disingenuous way, it was just who he was.
Have you ever heard him speak?
I haven’t heard him speak in a long time. I listened to a couple interviews when he passed, but it’s been a little.
His voice on the page was his voice as he spoke, which I think is the cool thing. That also was a massive influence in me. I was like, “oh, I don’t have to [change].” I don’t know how much folks like reading this or whatever will know about my background, but I don’t have any quote, unquote formal training in writing. I’m like a dropout. You know what I mean? And I came up in the hood, and I came up around people who spoke a certain way and utilized language a certain way. And to me, those were the poets, the guys outside the corner store, and the barbers who talked with certain kind of slang were the poets. And so, it never occurred to me that I shouldn’t write a very certain way. It never occurred to me that the language on the page should stray far from the way I was speaking, because as you know, eventually I was like, “I might have to read this shit out loud.” I came up in performance poetry, so I was like, “Anything I put on the page, I’m gonna have to read out loud.” So the fuck I look like writing some shit that does not actually represent the the sonic language and material language that I came up around? So what was massively admirable to me about Tate was that he also had the exuberance that shows up on the page. I always talk about how it feels like his language leaps off the page with a tone of deep care, but also indictment. That is how he spoke in real life. He felt delightfully indicted and also thrilled. As if he held the keys to something that he just could not wait to show you. And I think to me that is a beautiful starting point of what a critic can be, right? Someone who cannot wait to show you something.
Something I’m often in awe of is the depth that he would get into on a topic, like the Electric Miles piece. I’m just thinking about him launching into quantum theory and then weaving in Ornette Coleman, which leads you to almost think, “How did we get here?” But it feels abundantly natural, somehow.
I remember when I first started writing … criticism in the style I was writing, which again, really took shape because of Tate. There were people who were like, “You’re asking a lot of a reader. You’re asking a lot for us to follow you, to this place and this place and this place.” And I always thought: well, yeah. …
Yeah.
What’s the alternative? And what I loved about Tate is that was his approach. Like, yeah, man. Like, what the fuck is y’all [wanting]? What’s the other alternative that you would prefer? You want me to ask little of you? You want me to ask less of you? Because in asking more of you, I’m also asking more of myself. Because I’m asking, in order for me to get to a place on the page where I’m saying, I’m asking you to keep track of many different places that I’m taking you and see how and where those places coalescing. That’s asking a lot out of me. It’s asking a lot out of my ability to be clear enough and precise enough and rigorous enough to make that happen. And so, of course, I’m asking a lot of you, the reader, because I’m asking a lot of myself, the writer. And Tate was so shameless in that approach. And I actually think, I don’t know. I don’t think a lot about awards and material decoration. However, I would imagine that there were a few reasons why Tate was not in his lifetime as materially decorated. And I think it’s because he was so unflinching about demanding a lot out of himself, and therefore out of his readers. And there are people who would prefer ease or comfort, and there are people who would prefer a critic simply tell them what to like and then get out of the way. Tell them what to love and then keep it moving, or tell them what to not love and keep it moving. That’s not criticism. That’s you know that’s an algorithm, and I think we have to at least demand that we’re more thoughtful than algorithms.
When you come across critics that seem to be strictly within that same family tree as Tate, what sort of values or tenets in their writing do you see as something that’s been passed down through different prisms.
I think fearlessness to challenge a status quo is a big one. I think an ability to have that skepticism, I love skepticism. I love when, gosh, I mean we’re in such a time where praise comes very quickly, and then praise arrives very quickly but doesn’t sustain. And because of the volume and velocity with which praise arrives, dissent gets buried. And so, if you think about the performance of praise, because sometimes I’m thinking about albums specifically. The performance of praise is sometimes what is the loudest? Because praise itself, there’s not a lot of space for rigorous and decisive critical praise. But nonetheless, the dissent gets buried, and so I love seeing someone push back against the status quo, and I think that’s important. And I see that a lot in the stuff I’m reading, at least. And I think that’s important.
This came out months ago, but just having Flyboy copies re-released in a wider capacity—how does it feel seeing it out and about?
It feels great. I guess for me, it’s just like an honor to be a part of it. Ultimately, like I’m kind of just a fan, like everybody else. I know that there’s maybe a little bit more to that for me than it is for someone who grew up in a different time, in a different way, different place, or whatever. But ultimately, at the core, this dude was a hero to me and remains a hero to me, and so to get to be a part of this. ... You know, I’d be happy if the book was out, even if my name wasn’t on it at all. You know, I mean, I’d just be happy that it’s back in the world. But to be a part of it ... I recently recorded it. I recorded the intro for the audio book. They asked me to record the intro for the audio book, and I was like, “Of course.” So I did that, and it was emotional. I was like, I’ll do it in one take. I had to get to the airport, so I was like, I got it. I’ll hit it in one. I’m gonna hit it in one take and get it over you. It took like a lot of takes because I was emotional reading it.
Not even because I wrote anything exceptionally beautiful to be clear. But I was emotional reading it because I was like, you know, I wish more people would have written this beautifully and warmly about him when he was alive. When I’m talking about lineage and collective building, I just hope we can all, particularly when I think about Black writers, be more generous and vocal to the ones who move us while they’re still here, even if we don’t agree with or love every single thing they write. If there’s someone who’s at any stage of a writing life who has written something that moved me, I desperately need them to know. And so Tate’s legacy lives on in that way for me too.
Great interview - just reading Hanif's book There's Always This Year on/around/adjacent to basketball...
Earnest fangirling always comes through in anything Hanif abdulraqqib writes! Love it