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What do you get when you take the funk of Chuck Brown, add in heavy drums, and layer in some smooth Rhythm and Blues Soul? In DC’s go-go music, you get a powerful political movement.
Go-go music originated in the 1960s in Washington, DC. A local marker of Black culture, the music belonged to us. Then came the 1990s crack epidemic.
Rather than address the epidemic as a public health issue, Washington DC blamed our music. Go-go quickly went underground while at the same time, the neighborhoods where go-go had thrived began to deteriorate.
The value of real estate dropped, and white people quickly moved in to steal the best parts of the city, making new neighborhoods too expensive for those driven out by bad public policy.
When one of the local Black business owners came through playing go-go to promote his business, as he always had for almost a quarter of a century, white residents had him silenced.
Then all hell broke loose.
We flooded the city with go-go music! It drew attention to Black people being displaced by white greed. The result? Go-go is now the official music of the city, and we notched an important win in the battle against removing us from our own neighborhoods. Turn it up!