The Beat: Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C.

6. The Media [Includes Image Plates]

The Media The way go-go is treated by the music industry is how block folks have been treated by the power structure. It's like you're a bastard child, we don't want you, you're not good enough to be part of it. Mowdare them say that! Soover the next 10,15, or 20years I would like to see go-go reach its rightful position of prominence.1 Cathy Hughes, founder of Radio One, Inc. From its inception, go-go has enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the mass media. Locally, the Washington Post and the Washington City Paper have not only devoted space to the music, but Chuck Brown and the making of the film Good to Go, for example, have been the subjects of upbeat, positive profiles in the Post by Richard Harrington and Alona Wartofsky. With the exception of pieces focused on the mid-'80s commercial interest in go-go, Wartofsky's thoughtful 1990 article "The Indestructable Beat of the District," and Ta-Nehisi Coates's fine oral history of go-go ("Dropping the Bomb") in the January 14-20, 2000, issue of the Washington City Paper, this weekly paper has tended to focus on record reviews and concert information. But they can't (nor should they) overlook the associations between go-go and drugs or Frank Smith's diatribes regarding his attempt to use violence at go-gos as an excuse for curfews in the late 1980s. The weekly Afrocentric papers, such as the Washington Afro-American, the Capitol Spotlight, the Washington Informer, and the Advocate, occasionally run stories as well, though usually of a less provocative nature. The Washington Times, on the other hand, has all but 6 The M e d i a 181 ignored this music. In short, the print media's overall coverage has been a very mixed bag. Local commercial radio has paid scant attention to go-go, mostly ghettoizing it to short, specialized block programming—although they occasionally throw in a cut by Trouble Funk, Junk Yard, Chuck Brown, Backyard, or Rare Essence. Except for WKYS-FM's weekly two-hour "Old School Go Go" program, currently there is no regularly scheduled radio programming focused on go-go. Even Pacifica Radio's Afrocentric WPFW-FM does not devote any of its weekly schedule to this indigenous form of African American music. In the early 1990s WOL-AM made a very clear statement when the management yanked off their evening go-go show, causing a short but loud, visible, and very public outburst of protest. Local record companies have been the only D.C.-area media that have regularly documented and disseminated go-go music. Their primary interest , of course, is not merely in capturing this music on tape, vinyl, or compact disc; they want to sell product and turn a profit. But this is where many of them display their shortcomings: they are homegrown, under-capitalized , and small companies. They generally lack the distribution essential to getting the music heard outside of metropolitan D.C. Junk Yard Band, for example, has records on several labels, including Street Records, the brainchild of Moe Shorter. But Street Records is not a "full-service" company (it assists only with recording)—it exists to get the music of Junk Yard to the folks on the streets. The sole local exception is Liaison Records, which is under Tom Goldfogle and Becky Marcus's steady hands. Liaison is not only a record label, but also adistributor that has the ability to get product not only to D.C. but throughout the mid-Atlantic States as well as certain chains of stores throughout the country. Liaison is more than a gogo operation; the company works with all types of black American popular music, including hip-hop and gospel. The ambivalence displayed by the national and local mass media has changed somewhat with the advent of the Internet. The World Wide Web has, among other things, helped to democratize the dissemination of information. For a relativelylow start-up price of several thousand dollars, one can purchase a domain name, buy the requisite computing power, and contract with an ISP (Internet Service Provider). This makes setting up a Web site much more affordable than disseminating information through almost any other form of mass media. A Web site also offers opportunities for commerce. Not surprisingly, go-go has found several notable homes on the Internet. 182...