Before Afrofuturism became a familiar word, Greg Tate was writing about Black music as though the future were already being made inside it. His sentences could move from a record’s groove to a political argument, from an artist’s costume to a history of cultural ownership, without presenting any one of those things as a footnote to another. Later, he built an ensemble large enough to make some of those arguments audible in real time. Tate’s criticism and his music share a proposition: Black experimental culture cannot be understood by holding it still for inspection. One has to follow the changes its makers produce.
Tate was an African American critic, writer, guitarist and bandleader whose essays appeared in The Village Voice and many other publications. He died in 2021. The collected essays in Flyboy in the Buttermilk and his later “Kalahari Hopscotch” show a critic making form part of an argument. Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, the group he founded, offered a different medium for the same appetite for crossings. The history of Afrofuturism often places Tate near the term’s beginning. That is true as far as it goes, but it can make his work sound like a definition he once helped supply. His writing and performances were more restless than a definition.
He was one of the people Mark Dery interviewed for the early 1990s project “Black to the Future,” in which the term Afrofuturism came into circulation. In a 2015 conversation with CapitalBop, Tate stressed that the culture existed before the name. He pointed toward Sun Ra and other makers who had already joined mythology, technology, music and speculative identities. In another interview, he called the term itself a little corny. His ambivalence is part of the record. Tate could help articulate a field while resisting the idea that a label created the artists inside it.
A sentence with a rhythm section
Flyboy in the Buttermilk first appeared in 1992, collecting criticism from a writer who could treat popular music as an intellectual event without sanding away its force. A 2026 reissue includes new framing by Questlove and Hanif Abdurraqib, but the essays themselves preserve the urgency of their original occasions. Tate wrote on musicians including George Clinton, Miles Davis, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Bad Brains. The subject might begin with one performer; the piece could widen into questions of audience, markets, Black artistic freedom or the terms on which experimental work is admitted to a canon.
The publisher’s excerpt from an early essay on guitarist James Blood Ulmer provides a compact example of Tate’s method. Ulmer’s music gives Tate a way to examine how funk could travel into a bohemian art setting and what that movement might gain or lose. George Clinton appears as a figure who made funk both a vast imaginative property and something audiences could claim together. Tate’s language moves through jokes, compressed allusions and sudden turns of address. The pace is not ornamental. It mimics the pressure of listening to a music in which a familiar pattern can be interrupted, stretched or made strange.
That density can initially leave a reader behind. Tate did not write as if every reference had to be translated immediately for somebody assumed to stand outside the culture. He let knowledge accumulate within a Black musical public and invited the reader to catch up. The essays therefore change a familiar critical relation. Instead of treating the artist as raw material and the critic as the person who supplies all meaning, Tate often writes as though the work already contains a theory. The critic’s job is to meet it at speed, with enough language to show how many paths run through it.
The choices matter for Afrofuturism because a future is not just a destination or a picture of a spaceship. It can be a method for refusing inherited limits on what counts as thought. A writer who insists that a rhythm, a comic image, a distorted guitar or a costume can carry an argument has expanded the field of evidence. Tate’s prose joins that expansion rather than merely reporting on it. His long sentences and abrupt shifts give the reader a small experience of moving among worlds whose boundaries have been artificially policed.
His interests were never restricted to a list of artists later accepted into the Afrofuturist canon. The range of Flyboy includes punk, hip-hop, jazz, visual art and political life. That breadth prevents the work from becoming an illustrated guide to a single style. Tate wanted to know what happens when Black artists operate without boundaries assigned by an industry or a critic. The speculative possibility lies partly in that refusal of a fixed assignment. A musician can use rock, funk and avant-garde practice without proving which one is the real home; a writer can let their interplay become the story.
The manifesto that changes its ground
In “Kalahari Hopscotch”, adapted from a 2016 address at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and published the following year, Tate approaches Afrocentric futurism through a deliberately crowded company of figures. Musicians, healers, tricksters, sacred and popular images, political actors and cultural memories all enter. The essay is not a neutral history of a movement arranged by date. It is an act of assembly, a performance of relation. A familiar name appears beside one from another tradition, then the ground shifts again.
Its “hopscotch” is a useful title for the method. A reader moves from one marked place to another, but the route is neither a single straight line nor a flight out of history. Tate’s prose keeps landing on social facts. It also jumps across them, making a rhythm of adjacency and difference. The essay’s imaginative reach can be read alongside its attention to conditions that made Black people’s futures precarious. His verbal play does not erase that pressure. It supplies a mode of movement through it.
The text also makes room for figures who do not fit an official genealogy of science fiction. A healer and a musician may each change what a community can imagine, though their tools and responsibilities differ. Tate’s willingness to put them in one conversation is not a claim that they are interchangeable. It asks what the field of futurity looks like when spiritual knowledge, popular performance and technological experiment are not forced into separate intellectual rooms. The connections are an argument about how culture works, made through the energy of the writing itself.
That energy came with caution about names. Tate could discuss Black futurism expansively, yet he knew a term might arrive after the practices it classified and then claim authority over them. His first-person account to CapitalBop makes that chronology explicit. The artists did not wait for the vocabulary. Tate kept working among them, hearing both makers already at work and unexpected descendants of their inventions.
His relation to the label also marks a difference from an easy story of cultural progress. Once a name becomes prominent, a publisher, festival or institution can gather diverse works under it. Visibility may follow; simplification may follow too. Tate’s own tastes and arguments do not align neatly with a single authorized sound. He spoke of the pleasure of artists crossing disciplines and of Black music creating spaces to think beyond a narrow discourse on race. His criticism asks readers to keep the particular work in view when a category becomes attractive.
A band that could change direction
Tate founded Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber around the turn of the millennium. In a first-person account of its origins, he said he wanted to hear what a contemporary group inspired by Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew might become if it used Lawrence “Butch” Morris’s Conduction method. Conduction gives a leader gestures with which to shape improvising players in real time. Tate described testing the idea in rehearsal, taking it to a debut show at CBGB, and recording Blood on the Leaf Opus No. 1. The band was not a score that existed unchanged before the people entered the room. Their response to one another was part of the composition.
That structure makes a persuasive companion to his criticism. An essay can assemble references across a page; a conducted ensemble assembles musicians across a stage. Neither author has total advance control of the result. The person shaping the work has to attend to what other makers offer, when they enter, and how a change in one part transforms the whole. Tate’s own guitar and baton placed him within the musical process he had so long described. His argument about collective invention could be tested in sound.
The band’s catalogue spans recordings with titles that announce experimentation without making every piece the same kind of experiment. More Than Posthuman: Rise of the Mojosexual Cotillion and Making Love to the Dark Ages place speculative and historical language in the names. Angels Over Oakanda proposes another invented geography. Across the documented performances and credits, a changing ensemble works through long forms, groove, improvisation and the direction of a conductor.
The 2021 Angels Over Oakanda release is especially clear about how many hands built that geography. The title track credits Tate with composition and loops, Jared Michael Nickerson with electric bass, and a large group of horn, guitar, keyboard and percussion players. Its recording account begins in Brooklyn in 2018 and continues through later studio work. Other parts of the suite credit Marque Gilmore for remix production and Lisala Beatty for vocal composition and arrangement. Tate supplied the lyrics for the latter song. The title’s play on Oakland and an imagined elsewhere is carried by a real network of contributors, each with a different responsibility in the finished work.
The album’s own production record reaches Stockholm through Gilmore’s remix work and later mastering sessions. These credits give the ensemble’s broad imaginative geography a tangible production route. A long first movement, a short vocal section, remixed material and an extended later treatment of the title piece do different things with the same invented place. Their variations turn Oakanda into a set of possible relations among rhythm, voice and memory rather than a fixed fictional map.
For The Rise of the Mojosexual Cotillion at The Kitchen in January 2008, the venue announced a suite of work inspired by post-Katrina New Orleans. The archive describes acid-funk and hip-hop elements layered with psychedelic grooves. A speculative title therefore accompanies a specific historical pressure. The city after the hurricane is not generic scenery for an adventurous sound. The project joined the musical memories and contemporary politics of New Orleans to the group’s trans-genre method. Tate’s interest in the future did not require leaving a devastated present out of earshot.
The ensemble’s live method matters as much as any single evocative name. A conducted improvisation can turn on an instruction at the moment of performance, yet the players bring their own histories and technical choices. The result is collective without being anonymous. Carnegie Hall’s account of a 2022 concert describes long-form composition, grooves and improvisation together. That performance came after Tate’s death, and the institution names the band as his creation while acknowledging the continuing players. The music’s capacity to move beyond its founder is part of what he built.
There is a temptation to regard a large ensemble as a metaphor for an ideal society. Tate’s work deserves a more practical account. A band has rehearsals, a leader, named players, techniques for cueing change, and the uncertain discipline of listening. None of that guarantees harmony or makes every participant equal in every decision. It does establish a form in which different kinds of expertise can act together without becoming identical. Burnt Sugar’s future-facing quality lies in this procedure as much as in a cosmic vocabulary.
What the word can and cannot hold
Tate appeared in John Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History, a film he recalled in the CapitalBop interview as another meeting point for artists thinking through Black science fiction and music. His involvement in Mark Dery’s early discussion helped give Afrofuturism a language, and later institutions often place him in that history. Those associations are real. The work also reaches beyond them. He made criticism that could turn a piece of music into a political and philosophical event. He helped an ensemble improvise its own passage between genres. He wrote a manifesto that could bring different traditions into one unsettled conversation.
In the 2016 interview in The Guardian, Tate spoke of Black artists making connections between politics and metaphysics and of artistic lives that could move across disciplines. That thought offers a key to the work without closing it. The connection is not made merely by putting two subjects in the same sentence. It has to be worked through in form: a transition in an essay, a cue to a player, an unexpected relation between the remembered and the possible. Tate’s forms were made for those transitions. They ask the reader and listener to take the movement seriously.
His writing also complicates a comforting idea that Afrofuturism always means optimism. A future imagined from within racial violence, market capture or cultural exclusion may be jagged, furious and funny. Flyboy can make a joke carry a charge. “Kalahari Hopscotch” can crowd a paragraph with ancestors and entertainers without smoothing their differences. Burnt Sugar can call up a groove and then redirect it. Such choices keep pleasure and argument together. The future is not a reward presented after history is resolved. It is something made among the unresolved materials of the present.
Tate died before the 2022 Carnegie Hall performance that presented his band within an Afrofuturism festival, and the later reissue of Flyboy brings his sentences to new readers. Neither event turns the work into a monument. A reader can still hear how an essay shifts its weight; a band can still respond to a cue in a way nobody planned entirely beforehand. Tate’s most durable lesson may be methodological. Listen to the maker before naming the movement. Notice the form before extracting its message. Then follow the work as it changes the route.