Since its origins in Washington, DC in the mid-1970s, go-go music and culture have remained intrinsically bound to the city. Natalie Hopkinson explores the relationship between the city and the cultural practice it gave rise to in her engrossing book, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City. Hopkinson, who has written for The New York Times and Washington Post among others, currently teaches journalism at Georgetown University. Based largely on ethnographic research, Hopkinson marks go-go's trajectory against the backdrop of DC's development in the era following the Civil Rights Movement, through to the election of the first black president in the USA. She relates the happenings in the go-go scene to the changing nature of DC itself – including the flight of the black middle-class elite from the city to the suburbs in the era following desegregation, to the recent changes in the city's demographics, fuelled largely by gentrification. Thus, Hopkinson's thoroughly researched book is not only survey of a musical culture, but also a complex consideration of race and class in a major US city.
The term ‘Chocolate City’ refers not only to a city with a black majority population, but also thriving black businesses and leadership. According to Hopkinson: ‘Indeed as far as Chocolate Cities go, there is no more extreme case than Washington, DC, in the second half of the twentieth century. Beyond the federal capital lies a very black city, DC …’ (pp. ix–x). Parliament, a funk band led by George Clinton, also paid tribute to DC's status with their 1975 album, Chocolate City.
In the first chapter, ‘A Black Body Politic’, Hopkinson uses Habermas's notion of the public sphere as a point of departure to discuss the black public sphere, the post-civil rights era, and how this enabled both hip-hop and go-go:
This social, political, and economic transformation of postindustrial urban centers in the 1970s allowed for the emergence of new kinds of public spheres. White and black middle-class flight and the abandonment of the city left a power vacuum in the United States. This allowed for the rise of underground economies that snatched their own cultural and economic power. In the Bronx in the mid-1970s, that was hip-hop. In Washington, DC, during the same time, it came in the form of go-go. (p. 10)
Chapter 2, ‘Club U’, relates the ‘peculiar set of historical circumstances that produced the Chocolate City’ (p. 16). The District of Columbia was created as the site of the nation's capital from land donated by Maryland and Virginia, where slavery was legal. Yet, it wasn't long before blacks living in DC enjoyed more rights than blacks in the rest of the country, eventually becoming ‘educated and prosperous’ (p. 17). By the 1970s, the city's fortunes had turned. As Hopkinson explains: ‘The paradox of desegregation is that middle-class flight only left the urban core poorer, blacker, and more isolated. In Washington it essentially produced two different places in the nation's capital: white federal Washington and black local DC’ (p. 19). The heart and soul of black DC was found in the area around U Street, which was disastrously affected by the 1968 riots and ‘by the early 1980s had become a dangerous and deadly eyesore’ (p. 21). The chapter's name refers to the weekly go-go club that took place on the ground floor of the Frank D. Reeves Municipal Center at the corner of 14th and U Streets. The building housed government offices during the day, and a go-go club at night, which was shut down in 2005 when a young man was killed after a fight there.
Chapter 3, ‘What's Happening’, deals with the particulars of go-go music and culture, identifying the key elements and figures critical to go-go. Particularly relevant here is the relationship between the performers and the audience:
Let's start with the so-called lead talker, whose hip-hop counterpart is an emcee or rapper, the person who ‘raps’ to the audience. Much like news anchors, lead talkers are professional witnesses, using the microphone as their journal. Native Washingtonians spend their lives immersed in both the historic details and cultural scripts that allow them to follow the story lines. Arriving at the go-go without knowing the script is like arriving at a movie five minutes before it is over … (p. 34)
It is not surprising, then, that audience members are critical partners in live go-go shows, where ‘shout outs’, call and response, and roll calls – where people line up to have their names read out by the band – solidify the performance's ties to the community. This is explored more closely in Chapter 4, ‘Call and Response’: ‘Opinions about events that rarely receive an ear in the mainstream media can be heard during go-go shows’ (p. 55). The business of go-go is addressed in Chapter 5, ‘The Archive’, in which Hopkinson introduces readers to Nico, a record-store manager whose collection of go-go performances runs into the thousands. Nico's recordings are a ‘rich archive of events, controversies, people, lives, and deaths that have occurred during the past twenty-five years’ (p. 98). The following chapter, ‘The Boondocks’, explores Prince George's County, a suburb of DC, ‘a shadow Chocolate City’ (p. 103), and one of the most affluent black districts in the USA. Hopkinson reviews its history and complex relationship with go-go, and provides an extended interview with Grandview Ron, a troubled young man from the area. Chapter 7, ‘Redemption Song’, describes gospel go-go projects, as well as the Unity Clothing Association, which was formed to protect the ‘ownership’ of go-go merchandising. The penultimate chapter, ‘Mr Obama's Washington’, serves as the conclusion. Here, Hopkinson makes a clear distinction between hip-hop and go-go: ‘Simply put: go-go never sold out’. Furthermore, ‘it is not distorted by multinational profit motives or the international gaze’ (p. 154). The final chapter, ‘Roll Call, 1986’ is the transcription of Rare Essence: Live at Breeze's Metro Club – the recording of a show by an enormously important band, when go-go itself was at ‘the height of [its] popularity’ (p. 162). The book also features an extensive photo gallery.
Reading Go-Go Live is both a rewarding and a frustrating experience. Peculiar descriptions such as ‘a cocoa-skinned woman’ (p. 87) highlight not only the subject's race, but her particular shade of blackness – neither of which is necessary in an anecdote about a woman who turns up to dance on the sidewalk outside Nico's record store. In the section about the Unity Clothing Association in Chapter 7, Hopkinson visits the ‘Korean-born entrepreneur’ (p. 134) whose Visionz line of T-shirts threatens black-owned companies; she describes him, but does not actually offer any direct quotes from him, i.e. she does not let him speak; rather she quotes his black business associate. In a book that resonates with quoted material from her interview partners, this is an odd exclusion.
A Canadian immigrant whose parents are from Guyana, Hopkinson moved to the USA when she was 10, and to DC when she was 17 to attend Howard University. In Chapter 8, she describes herself as ‘someone who never felt I had a place in the world as a black woman’ (p. 160). The sense of Hopkinson having found her place in DC – and wanting to protect it – is reflected, for example, in this passage from the preface: ‘For me, the moment that punctured the veil of black invincibility came one evening, when I saw a pack of white people on rollerblades moseying down my block in the city's Logan Circle neighbourhood, long after the sun had set’ (p. xi). Yet having also identified herself as middle class, she admits that the threats posed by gentrification also offer opportunities: ‘Ultimately, the socioeconomic integration that comes along with gentrification could lead to better life chances for black children in Washington, DC’ (p. 161).
Go-Go Live may not change the way readers think about race and class in the USA, but it does give readers a compelling account of DC. Moreover, the book reveals a vibrant, local music scene whose relevance for fans shows no sign of diminishing – despite the loss of the city's black majority population.
