Go-go pioneer Chuck Brown performs in 2011. (Reuters) This post has been corrected. A little more than a month ago, thousands descended on Washington, D.C.' S Howard Theater to say goodbye to a legend.
Chuck Brown, the guitarist who became synonymous with D.C.' S go-go music scene, had died at age 75. But while the assembled waited in the rain to be let inside to view Brown's body, an official-looking man—one person there said he was wearing a police jersey, while a Howard spokesperson said the man was a fire marshal—showed up and told the crowd to disband because of lightning.* The crowd didn't budge, recalled author Natalie Hopkinson, who was there with her two children. Instead, it got more vocal and agitated. 'Wind me up, Chuck,' the masses roared (a common refrain shouted.) Emotions were running high between go-go fans and authorities.
Berger Seeing Is Believing Pdf Download. After all, go-go's Godfather had been laid to rest—following a decade of flagrant reminders that go-go music (or a big part of the population that listens to it, at least) isn't welcome in the new vision of D.C. Natalie Hopkinson in her new book enthrallingly captures—with interviews, photographs and accessible reportage—the ways in which go-go tells. She traces the music's fascinating political history, beginning with President Lincoln's freeing of the slaves in D.C. Nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation, and including the founding of the historic Howard University in 1867 and the flowering of black institutions within the city during segregation. But to read her book and then look around D.C. These days is to get the sense that go-go's on the wane, and that the very city that created and nurtured this music has changed so fundamentally as to now reject it.
'It's this go-go,' one D.C. Cop testified in 2005. 'If you bring go-go in, you're going to have problems.' Go-go, so named because the music just goes and goes, is a love child of the blues, funk, salsa, gospel, and soul that emerged in the '70s with obvious The genre was created in D.C., a city where blacks from all corners of the globe could experience—or at least imagine—what Hopkinson calls 'black privilege' in her book. Ranked among the few cities in the United States where black people could not be called 'minorities,' with the whiff of inferiority that label carries with it' she writes. 'To live in a Chocolate City is to taste an unquantifiable richness.