Sitting in a homely bistro on Malcolm X Boulevard, music journalist Greg Tate is bundled up in a peaked beanie, bright yellow scarf, and plenty of padded layers. His threads offer protection from the chill setting down on the Harlem streets outside, streets that have offered a home to a galaxy of Black American icons—from Duke Ellington to Cam’ron—across the last century. When a little-known mixtape track by local rapper Vado starts to pour out of the speakers, Tate breaks from his salmon salad to shake from side to side. At 60, one of the most influential hip-hop writers to ever strut these curbs still keeps his ears wide open.

It was 1981 when Tate jumped on an Amtrak from Washington D.C. to New York City to cover Harlem rap group the Fearless Four’s show at the Roxy, his first assignment for The Village Voice. The following year, he moved to the city, accelerating a blistering career with the Voice that’s included dozens of lengthy columns on culture, politics and, of course, the snowballing hip-hop scene.

“It was like writing war dispatches right there on the ground,” Tate recalls of those early years in NYC. “There was all this incendiary work coming out. It was unprecedented. It didn’t sound like anything that had come before. There was a lot to talk about.”

If the work of famed music critic Lester Bangs was informed by the sound of rock’n’roll, Tate’s wordplay encapsulated the rhythm and flavor of hip-hop. He drew inspiration from writers he saw as purveyors of “conversational, creative work coming out of Black vernacular” including poet Langston Hughes, jazz critic Amiri Baraka, and Pedro Bell, who wrote liner notes for Funkadelic. Take Tate’s 1989 review of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, which he used to take on the inventive rhyme styles coming out of New York: “Out, out, out my face talking about dope. Man, your shit is tired in a daisy age. The operative word in hip-hop today is freestyle. Well, at least in your big chucklehead mind if you want it to be. It’s your thing, do what you wanna do. I can’t tell you how to sock it. But if I could, I’d advise don’t be redundant.”

Tate’s work helped ignite a generation of writers who covered rap music and culture from the early 1980s right through to the turn of the century. Coming of age with the b-boys, break dancers, and kids who graffiti-bombed subway cars, these scribes connected Ralph Ellison to Eric B, James Baldwin to bling, contextualizing the hip-hop generation and all its innovation. Having experienced this genesis first-hand, they carry the culture’s DNA. They were, and are, hip-hop.

These critics spent their nights prowling New York’s cultural epicenters, relentlessly thirsty for new virtuosity at a time when Gotham’s artistic arteries were pulsing. They smoked weed with the rappers they were covering and got into spats with artists when their reviews weren’t overwhelmingly positive. Writers frequently moved from the pages of The Village Voice, Spin, Billboard, and, later, hip-hop-focused publications like The Source, Vibe, and XXL on a week-to-week, byline-to-byline basis.

Rather than stick to the rigged constraints of traditional music criticism, writers used the music as an entry point into discussing race, identity, youth, and broader culture. They extensively covered politics and social issues, penning groundbreaking pieces on, for example, the L.A. riots, the crack epidemic, and gun laws. Their insights were as cutting as those of KRS-One, Public Enemy, and other socially-engaged artists of the era. At a time when many other glossy magazines were slow to publish writers of color, hip-hop publications amplified their voice.

On the West Coast, magazines like URB, Rap Pages, Rap Sheet, and Murder Dog built on the work of alt-weeklies including L.A. Weekly and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. But, as both the birthplace of hip-hop and the center of America’s publishing industry, New York spawned much of rap’s literary lineage. It’s where many writers and publications gravitated in those early years, their prose mirroring the rhythm of the city.

Eager to extend the outer boundaries of their creativity, many of these writers would go on to ink novels, memoirs, short stories, scripts, and poetry, much of which stayed true to the language and attitude of hip-hop, as though their words were drafted to the sound of a boom-bap beat. It all added up to a low-key literary movement that writer and activist Kevin Powell has dubbed, “The Word Movement.”

“We were dating each other and getting high and drinking. Everything was open bars and velvet ropes,” says Bronx-born critic Miles Marshall Lewis, who began his career in the ’90s. “In my mid 20s, I was enamoured of the Beat Generation—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg—and thinking we would be the new version of that.”

Tracii McGregor, former editor for The Source, remembers the support writers from all over the country offered one another, everyone striving towards a common goal. “We were driven by the fact that we knew this was important work and that we had to do it,” she says. “We had to represent.”