Go-Go Live

<div>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.<p><i>Go-Go Live</i> 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.</p></div>