Go-go is the conga drum-inflected black popular music that emerged in
Washington, D.C., during the 1970s. The guitarist Chuck Brown, the
"Godfather of Go-Go," created the music by mixing sounds borrowed from
church and the blues with the funk and flavor that he picked up playing
for a local Latino band. Born in the inner city, amid the charred ruins
of the 1968 race riots, go-go generated a distinct culture and an
economy of independent, almost exclusively black-owned businesses that
sold tickets to shows and recordings of live go-gos. At the peak of its
popularity, in the 1980s, go-go could be heard around the capital every
night of the week, on college campuses and in crumbling historic
theaters, hole-in-the-wall nightclubs, backyards, and city parks.Go-Go Live
is a social history of black Washington told through its go-go music
and culture. Encompassing dance moves, nightclubs, and fashion, as well
as the voices of artists, fans, business owners, and politicians,
Natalie Hopkinson's Washington-based narrative reflects the broader
history of race in urban America in the second half of the twentieth
century and the early twenty-first. In the 1990s, the middle class that
had left the city for the suburbs in the postwar years began to return.
Gentrification drove up property values and pushed go-go into D.C.'s
suburbs. The Chocolate City is in decline, but its heart, D.C.'s
distinctive go-go musical culture, continues to beat. On any given
night, there's live go-go in the D.C. metro area.
