(2000), a collection of his reviews and writings on jazz, Considering Genius (2007), and a biography of the jazz musician Charlie Parker, Kansas City Lightning (2013). Crouch became less of a public figure due to declining health during his last decade. He died on September 16, 2020, at Calvary Hospital in New York City. The cause of death was a "long, unspecified illness," though he also struggled with a bout of COVID-19 in the spring. He was 74. Personal life Crouch lived in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Opinions As a political thinker, Crouch was initially drawn to, then became disillusioned with, the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. His critiques of his former co-thinkers, whom he refers to as a "lost generation", are collected in Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979–1989 and The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990–1994. He identified the embrace of racial essentialism among African-American leaders and intellectuals as a diversion from issues more central to the betterment of African Americans and society as a whole. In the 1990s, he upset many political thinkers when he declared himself a "radical pragmatist". He explained, "I affirm whatever I think has the best chance of working, of being both inspirational and unsentimental, of reasoning across the categories of false division and beyond the decoy of race". In his syndicated column for the New York Daily News, Crouch frequently criticized prominent African Americans. Crouch was critical of, among others: Alex Haley, the author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots: The Saga of an American Family; community leader Al Sharpton; filmmaker Spike Lee; scholar Cornel West, and poet and playwright Amiri Baraka. Crouch was also a fierce critic of gangsta rap music, asserting that it promotes violence, criminal lifestyles, and degrading attitudes toward women. With this viewpoint, he defended Bill Cosby's "Pound Cake Speech" and praised a women's group at Spelman College for speaking out against rap music. With regard to rapper Tupac Shakur he wrote, "what dredged-up scum you are willing to pay for is what scum you get, on or off stage." From the late 1970s, Crouch was critical of forms of jazz that diverge from what he regarded as its essential core values, similar to the opinions of Albert Murray on the same topic. In jazz critic Alex Henderson's assessment, Crouch was a