Massively influential cultural critic Greg Tate has died.

“Hard to explain the impact that Flyboy in the Buttermilk had on a whole generation of young writers and critics who read every page of it like scripture,” The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb wrote on Twitter, aptly summing up the effect that Tate’s iconic 1992 essay collection had on the world.

The collective asserted the Black authorship of rock & roll, and sought equitable treatment for Black artists across genres.

“The BRC opposes those racist and reactionary forces within the American music industry which undermine and purloin our musical legacy and deny Black artists the expressive freedom and economic rewards that our Caucasian counterparts enjoy as a matter of course,” reads the organization’s manifesto, written by Tate.

“The Black Rock Coalition is shocked, saddened and absolutely devastated with the news that our brother, friend and co-founder Greg Tate made his transition earlier today,” the group said in a statement following Tate’s death.

“Greg led the wave of Black writers who, without apology, honored the past yet went full speed ahead into the future, giving dap to Black artists across the cultural spectrum who were not getting love within mainstream circles.”.

“Those who dismiss Chuck D as a bullshit artist because he’s loud, pro-black, and proud will likely miss out on gifts for blues pathos and black comedy,” he wrote in a 1988 piece on Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

Tate kept writing for the Voice through 2005; contributed to The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and many other outlets; and would go on to publish several other noteworthy books, including Midnight Lightning, which Tate called “a Jimi Hendrix Primer for Blackfolk,” and a Flyboy sequel that featured pieces on Sade, Björk, Azealia Banks, and Joni Mitchell, as well as further examinations of Baraka, Hendrix, and Davis?

(In 2015, reviewing Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly for Rolling Stone, he wrote, “Roll over Beethoven, tell Thomas Jefferson and his overseer Bull Connor the news: Kendrick Lamar and his jazzy guerrilla hands just mob-deeped the new Jim Crow, then stomped a mud hole out that ass.”) He was also active in music for decades, establishing his own inter-genre ensemble Burnt Sugar, where he played guitar, conducted spontaneously in the manner of New York avant-jazz trailblazer Butch Morris, and brought together his diverse musical interests, from free jazz to funk and psychedelic rock

“[N]o language for how thankful I am to have lived in a time where I could learn from Greg Tate,” wrote Hanif Abdurraqib

“Just heard that my friend, my mentor, one of the greatest writers of his generation Greg Tate passed away last night,” wrote Touré

no language for how thankful I am to have lived in a time where I could learn from Greg Tate