Tate was the author of five books of cultural essays and music criticism, including Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992), Everything But the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture (2003), and the posthumous James Brown’s Body and the Revolution of the Mind (forthcoming). He was a staff writer for The Village Voice from 1987 to 2005, and a visiting professor at Brown University and Columbia University. An influential cultural critic, Variety Magazine calls Tate the “godfather of hip-hop journalism.”
Tate was also a musician, playing guitar for the avant-garde ensemble Burnt Sugar, and he was one of the three co-founders of the Black Rock Coalition, an organization which advocated for equitable treatment for artists of African descent. He was a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies. His articles appeared regularly in The New York Times, Down Beat, Spin, and Rolling Stone.
Tate was born in Dayton, Ohio and lived in DC from age 13 through college at Howard University; this is one of his addresses in the basement apartment. Beginning in the early 1980s through his death at age 64, he lived in New York City.