In 2019, a tenant of a luxury apartment building in the Shaw neighborhood in Washington, D.C., complained of constant noise emanating from a MetroPCS storefront nearby.
The noise flowing from the speakers outside the store was the sound of go-go music, an outgrowth of funk music born in the nation’s capital. When T-Mobile informed store owner Donald Campbell that he would need to turn off the music due to a potential lawsuit over the sounds that he has played since the ’90s, a throng of residents and supporters organized protests on the corner to demand go-go returned to Georgia and Florida avenues. Eventually, T-Mobile acquiesced.
Campbell was allowed to play his beloved music outside of his store again. Utilizing the hashtag #DontMuteDC , an online petition and the steady beat of go-go, the protesters showed the world that the sound of the district would never be silenced. With the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the highly-anticipated Go-Go Museum and Café in D.
C.’s historic Anacostia neighborhood Monday, the museum’s creators have cemented go-go’s place in the lineage of Black liberation music — from Komfa in Guyana, Candomblé in Brazil, and Santería in Cuba. “Black people, throughout history and across time and space, have used our trauma of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade of forced displacement.
There’s certain things that happen to Black people wherever we are, whether it’s in Cuba or Brazil or Jamaica or anywhere,” said Dr. Natalie Hopkinson, the m.
