ANDRE HARRELL AND GREG TATE

Two late friends connected by music and vision

Four years ago today Andre Harrell died in Los Angeles. He was an early MC, who later founded Uptown Records, THE crucial hip hop meets R&B label. I’m working on a book that includes a look at Andre’s life and this short section is about he changed my life and shape my thinking.

STRICTLY BUSINESS AND MAGICAL THINKING

Uptown Records’ first office was in a duplex in Brooklyn, a workspace/social club/temporary housing for the young staff. One night in 1990 Andre threw a smoking house party with people dancing all over the place, particularly Beverly Bond, who’d become known for her crazy, aggressive dance style. The chant “Go Beverly!” followed her around when she got down. A brave nerdy acquaintance took on the challenge of dancing with Beverly, which tickled Andre, me, and others. “What a wild love story it would be the two of them dated,” someone suggested. The germ of an idea blossom into a screenplay I co-wrote and, within a year the film ‘Strictly Business’ (originally titled ‘Go Beverly!’) is filmed in New York with comic Tommy Davidson, playing an ambitious mail room clerk, who guides an uptight buppie Joseph Phillips through the city’s nightlife in pursuit of a gorgeous “it” girl played by Halle Berry.

While the character Davidson portrayed wasn’t named Andre, it was his drive and humor that provided the motivation for that defiantly aspirational character. Moreover, the soundtrack album proved a landmark in that Mary J. Blige, a singer Andre believes in, has her first single, “Remind Me,” on that album.

For me, getting a writing credit on ‘Strictly Business’ confirmed I’d done the right thing quitting Billboard in 1989. I had been at the music trade publishing as a staffer since 1982. I’d been “inside the building,” where the security of writing for the industry’s leading trade publication had helped me craft three books on music history and build a rep as an expert on black culture’s evolution. Now I was writing novels, contributing to the Village Voice and now I was a professional screenwriter (though truthfully, I didn’t really understand the craft as well as I should thought.) Nevertheless, here I was with my name on screen, and Andre’s hustle and salesmanship had taken my career to a new level, something he had done, and would do, for many more people.

His superpower was understanding the undercurrents of black culture and finding talent that reflected, not just their personal experience, but that of a community. Andre wasn’t just interested in hit records (though he loved having them), but songs that expressed the unspoken. Andre would expound on why an artist was “aspirational,” how they could “define the culture,” and why their development “would lead their fans with them” to new experiences. It was these conversations/debates/arguments with Andre, Gary Harris and a few other folks from the circle that sharpened me as an historian. Through Andre’s eyes I saw first-hand the passion, vision, and will power essential to shaping a musical movement. What I was doing for a living was making judgements on art, making distinctions between what was important and what wasn’t. Andre was doing the same thing, except he had to do the harder work of turning raw talent into singers, rappers, and executives. His success with Uptown was in turning his aesthetic into action.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

Yesterday Greg Tate was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. The critic and musician died on December 7, 2021, leaving a legacy of writing and music that will be studied for decades to come. Here’s a bit from the chapter on Greg from that same in progress book.

COLLEAGUES

Greg and I were colleagues, an old-fashioned phrase, that I think captures the shared experience of being a young music critic at that publication at that time. The Voice came out on Wednesday night and folks who looking for apartments waited in line at the Astor Place newsstand for first crack at the listings. Friday was when people looking to make plans for the weekend got the Voice to puruse the paper’s unmatched classified listings for apartments and ads for jazz, dance, movies etc.

So, when I went out on Friday or Saturday, you sat around people who’d read your thoughts on Rakim or Luther Vandross or Tracy Chapman and were primed to praise or criticize your take. This wasn’t like today’s social media, where anonymous tags yell at you from cyberspace. This all-face-to-face conversations on subway platforms, at bar or by open window at house parties. It was extremely personal. Because Greg was black, male, my age and covering parts of the same waterfront, I know he experienced a lot of what I did. He may have processed it differently, but it was a very specific experience we shared. So, I always felt connected to Greg in a way very different from my artistic friends who made music or film.

Unlike Greg’s acolytes, who came into the writing game in thrall to his vivid sentences and stunning range of references, I was writing contemporaneous with him, my pieces running side by side with his. I imagine it was like playing on the Bulls with Michael Jordan, knowing you had to level up to be on the court with him.

Check out this dynamic passage from his piece, Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke from the Voice, December 9, 1986:

“What the cult-nats made possible is a conception of black culture where anything black could be considered an aesthetic object of contemplation more beautiful than anything produced by the white man. In this sense the cult-nats were our dadaists. While the dadaists tried to raise anarchy to an artform and bring Western civilization down with style, the cult-nats figured a “black is beau­tiful” campaign would be enough to raze Babylon, or at least get a revolution going. The cult-nats’ black-übermensch campaign obviously didn’t do much toward liberating the masses, but it did produce a post-liberated black aesthetic, responsible for the degree to which contemporary black artists and intellectuals feel them­selves heirs to a culture every bit as def as classical Western civilization.” 

Ok, dude just blended of ‘70S black agitprop, art theory, Frederick Nietzsche, and ‘80s slang – a mix he was capable of every week.

Tricia Romano’s ‘The Freaks Came Out to Write,’ about the Village Voice, has a great section of Greg. Infact it was Greg who suggested the book’s title.