Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City by Natalie Hopkinson (review)

“Taxation without representation” is a slogan Washingtonians have adopted to convey their disenfranchised political status. Although they are tax-paying citizens, Washing-tonians do not have voting representation in the U.S. Congress and Senate. This lack of power is noticeable because Washington, DC, has long been characterized as a “Chocolate City” with predominately black residents. Such racially tinged exclusion is dissonant in a twenty-first century United States. Especially with the re-election of the nation’s first African American President Barack Hussein Obama, DC’s most prominent and powerful black resident. President Obama’s ascent to office would suggest the beginning of a new era in which racism no longer exists. Scholars such as Kip Lornell and Charles Stephenson have previously noted that DC’s black population has demonstrated ingenuity in reclaiming the public sphere through outlets such as live go-go music performances. There are, however, persistent systemic structures with which Washingtonians contend in order to realize their full citizenship. Natalie Hopkinson engages these discourses as a scholar and journalist for the Washington Post. This is the lens through which she writes, as the foremost voice for go-go culture in national media coverage.

In Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City, Natalie Hopkinson considers the current constituency’s use of go-go music performance as a vehicle through which history is transmitted and socio-politics is negotiated. While DC’s black majority declines, receding to the suburbs and acquiescing to gentrification, native practitioners and scholars clamor to document and preserve its rich cultural legacy. Among unique DC symbols such as mambo sauce, go-go music remains a DC treasure that strongly signifies Washingtonians’ musical landmarking of the nation’s capital.

The late South Carolina migrant Chuck Brown is held as the Godfather of go-go music, which is a percussive funk music that surfaced in DC, straddling the late-1960s to mid-1970s. It emerged on the heels of DC’s most devastating uprisings. Brown mixed elements of jazz, gospel, and Latin music, in a musically expansive manner, to keep people on the dance floor and the party going and going. While other rhythm section instruments are used in the bands, go-go is characterized by a core percussion combination of congas, cowbells, and rototoms.

Throughout Hopkinson’s nine chapters in Go-Go Live, she examines practices in what I conceive of as a political economy of musical homage. A political economy of musical homage accounts for the ways in which participants negotiate the web of remembrance, representation, and border crossing in the live music industry, particularly in contested and surveilled black urban settings. Go-go music’s homage is performed through musicians’ definitive custom of doing go-go beat covers of Top 10 pop and hip hop hits. Moreover, tributes to deceased participants are fashioned through participants’ customized raiment. They wear t-shirts with photographs of loved ones to remember the visage and dates of those killed in go-go networks. Reverence is also given, when lead talkers of the band (similar to a rapper in hip hop) acknowledge attendees in the crowd and those who paved the way. In fact, it is the recorded shout outs to fans that are the most prized commodity for go-go patrons. Hopkinson likened the recordings to oral time capsules. People purchase the recordings to hear their name, as they relive the love shown to them while grooving to the go-go beat. Homage is also demonstrated through Hopkinson’s ethnography of participants representing when they respond to a lead talker’s call to the crowd, such as “Hey! Tell me, where y’all from?” Responding to the call with one’s neighborhood, county, “crew,” school, street, city, church (in the case of gospel go-go), and state signifies multiple levels of migration.

Hopkinson accounts for go-go musicians’ and music’s mobility in its “liveness,” when she asserts that...