Provides a critical, inside account of the go-go scene and how it survives in a changing city

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.

"“Part history of, part elegy for, ‘the displacement of black communities and a slow death of the Chocolate City,’ the text is supplemented by a rich photo insert documenting both dance floor and street. . . . Her assessment of a local phenomenon offers a glimpse of a culture off the mainstream’s radar.”" - Publishers Weekly

"“With the election of Barack Obama and the return of the white middle class to the urban core, Hopkinson’s beloved Chocolate City and the music it spawned may be a thing of the past. Go-Go Live is thus not just a work of scholarship but an eloquent piece of cultural partisanship, an elegy, a counter-narrative, a love letter.”" - Washington Post

"“Hopkinson's book is part requiem for a culture that she sees being cast aside by a changing DC, and part appreciation of its unlikely survival and evolution. Her interviewees are full of rich stories. . . .”" - Bookforum

"“[A] fascinating new book about go-go, D.C., and race in urban America. . . . Hopkinson’s book is also a plaint of ambivalent hopefulness that this post-Chocolate City, Barack Obama-era Washington, D.C., can begin to overcome that separate-and-unequal racial division still at the heart of America.”" - Baltimore City Paper

"“. . . Go-Go Live is a good read for DC residents and music lovers in general - if for no other reason than its subject matter. In the 40 year history of go-go music this is only the second book ever written about the genre. The first being the seminal The Beat by Charles Stephenson and Kip Lornell. Hopefully books like The Beat and Go-Go Live will inspire the next generation of go-go fans to record and document their own experiences about their city and its amazing indigenous music.”" - DC Examiner

"“Go-Go Live is a compelling, methodologically bold ethnographic history of a city and artistic form that have both received too little scholarly attention. And in the wake of Chuck Brown’s death, its content and style can be appreciated by academics and go-go fans alike.”" - History News Network

"“[I]t’s a shame that [Chuck] Brown wasn’t around to read the love, knowledge and understanding go-go, and black D.C. by extension, receive in Natalie Hopkinson’s Go-Go Live. . . . As Hopkinson makes clear, the life of urban black America involves issues that are far larger than music, but music is how black folk often work through them.”" - PopMatters

"“Hopkinson shows the strength of the Black community in the eyes of its eventual displacement. Go-Go Live isn’t just the history of a genre of Black music; it’s the history of Black people in a certain region of America. It’s the history of Black America itself.”" - Amsterdam News

"“Hopkinson writes with great, sometimes astonishing, insight, and this is a work that is sorely needed. Recommended for readers interested in gentrification, nongovernmental DC, and the music that animates its culture.”" - Library Journal

"“No written work could fully capture the excitement of go-go culture, but Hopkinson comes close. . . . Go-Go Live provides a loving profile of this unique musical culture. By tying go-go to the tumultuous history of one of the US’s most important cities, Hopkinson’s work will undoubtedly become an important resource to students of music, race, and US history.”" - Popular Music and Society

"If you find yourself thinking earnestly about what we should be preserving of the D.C. we have inherited, you should definitely read Hopkinson’s book and then keep your ears tuned to the sounds it amplifies." - Washington Post