[1][4] When he was 13 years old, his family moved to Washington, D.C.[5][6] His parents Charles and Florence (Grinner) Tate were civil rights movement activists involved in the Congress of Racial Equality, and played Malcolm X speeches and Nina Simone's music around the house.

[9] The following year Tate moved to New York City, where he developed friendships with other musicians, including James "Blood" Ulmer and Vernon Reid.

[8][10] In 1999, Tate established Burnt Sugar, an improvisational ensemble that varies in size between 13 and 35 musicians and blended a range of genres including funk, free jazz, and psychedelic rock.

[14] He developed a reputation for "slangy erudition", Hua Hsu wrote: "His best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon; they were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn't have got along but did, a trans-everything collision of pop stars, filmmakers, subterranean graffiti artists, Ivory Tower theorists, and Tate's personal buddies, who often came across as the wisest of the bunch.

"[12] Tate's 1986 essay "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky Deke" for the Voice Literary Supplement is widely regarded as a milestone in black cultural criticism;[15] in the essay, he juxtaposed the "somewhat stultified stereotype of the black intellectual as one who operates from a narrow-minded, essentialized notion of black culture" (cultural nationalists, or Cult-Nats) with the freaky "many vibrant colors and dynamics of African American life and art",[16][15] trying to find a middle ground in order to break down "that bastion of white supremacist thinking, the Western art [and literary] world[s]".

[17] His work was also published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Artforum, DownBeat, Essence, JazzTimes, Rolling Stone, and VIBE.

[22][4] Writing for Pitchfork, Allison Hussey said, "It became a definitive work for Tate", treating subjects like Miles Davis, Public Enemy, and Jean Michel Basquiat.