Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City

Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate CityGo 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

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.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 05/22/2012
ISBN: 9780822352112
Pages: 232
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.10w x 0.60d

Review Citations: Publishers Weekly 04/23/2012 pg. 47
Library Journal 07/01/2012