Why Go-Go Never Made it Out of DC
2009-05-29
By Eric Easter
Type the words “GoGo Music” into Google Images, and you won’t get photos of EU or the Junkyard Band. You will get plenty of GoGo dancers and a link to GoGo, a German label that churns out Teutonic house and techno. Type”GoGo” into YouTube’s search engine and you’ll flip through ten pages of Wham’s “Wake me up Before you Go-Go” and videos of the formerly slender Go-Go’s before you find anything close to relevance. In trying to illustrate this article I searched through AP for go-go legend Chuck Brown photo and got Larry Brown, coach of the Charlotte Bobcats. I punched in “GoGo” and turned up –- Frank and Tina Sinatra? What?
Even in this age of instant information about everything, you still have to know exactly what you’re looking for, and where to look, to find Washington DC’s original music.
Go-go music has threatened to breakout from the musical prison of the DC-Maryland border for nearly three decades now but has yet to succeed on a large scale. Over the years, many a producer and investor has staked his reputation on go-go doing for DC what Dirty South did for Atlanta but to no avail.
Chris Blackwell of Island music fame stepped in around the mid eighties and applied the Crush Groove theorem – make a movie and they will come. Then he cast the least hip guy he could find, Art Garfunkel (was it the Jew-fro?) as the great white hunter who discovers the music of the jungle. Unfortunately – and deservedly – it tanked, along with the first big dream of national attention. When Miles Davis plucked go-go drummer Ricky Wellman from the Soul Searchers, many thought that would be the spark. But not even Miles had the Midas touch.
There are reasons for that. While its charms are many, the music also has its challenges. Many of its tunes have deeply intriguing and complicated rhythms, but no melody and no hook, things critical for commercialization. They rarely follow the familiar verse/chorus/verse familiarity unless it’s a cover tune, and they can be interminably long. There just is no elegant way to end a go-go tune, because in concert go-go tunes never end.
Also, the bands are BT Express/Atlantic Starr/ Commodores-style huge, rendering them nameless and faceless, and probably broke after the money gets divided up. The vocals are often untrained, and obviously so. Plus shout-outs to the Benning Road Crew don’t carry the same allure and mystery as say, Compton, Brooklyn or the West Side – any city’s west side.
Most importantly, as Vetalle Fusilier points out in his article, go-go is above all, a live experience. Deep, pure, raw go-go needs the listener’s cultural memory to bring it to life – thoughts of backyard parties, girls in tight pants, half smokes and doing “the baseball” to Herman Kelly’s " Dance to the Drummer's Beat “ on a hot ass summer night.
Those things don’t translate outside the city line. You want to stop a party quick in Chicago? Put on some go-go. Trust me, I’ve tried.
But if people in the Chi can’t hang with “Sardines and Pork n’ Beans”, that’s their problem. And for the record, I can close down a party in DC just as quickly with some bullshit house music. Jack that, bama.
But at least house made it global – as did the blues, jug and fiddle, drum and bass, soca, reggaeton, grunge, samba, funana, zouk and just about every other regional groove you can mispronounce. I’ve been looking for Putumayo’s “Go-Go Bedtime” in Whole Foods, but I guess that’s not happening.
And like a lot of regional music forms, go-go has sold the best when done by musicians who are not classically in the genre. For my money, some of the best go-go tunes was done by Grace Jones (“The Fashion Show”), Cee-Lo and Timbaland (I'll Be Around) and of course, Amerie. But unlike some Paul Simon-ized version of go-go, those artists treated their influence with the utmost respect, even lifting them and showing a path for pure go-go artists to follow. Production values. Solid vocals. A beginning, a middle and for the love of God, an ending.
Like anybody who lived in and loved DC, I’m still hoping for an eventual breakout. DC needs it. Go-go deserves it. WALE’s been signed to Geffen and has a two-page spread in the new GQ. Could this, finally, be some love?
Whose Tube? Welcome to the Go-Go
Eric Easter is VP of Digital & Entertainment for Johnson Publishing, Co., Inc. He writes about politics, culture and technology for EbonyJet.com.
