The walls of the small music room could not stop the beat of drums, the thrum of bass and the waves of music from seeping out. The band inside had found its pocket, and for the next several minutes they would live there — bending the very air around them with their sound.
“What y’all want to play now? Junkyard?” said Kevin Ivy, 17, a senior at the SEED School of Washington, one of the city’s oldest charter schools.
“Yeah, yeah, who starts the song?” asked Jennifer Kennedy, a music teacher at the school.
“Drums,” Ivy said, grinning wide from behind a burgundy drum set.
The unmistakable groove of go-go and its unique blend of percussive funk, Latin beats, gospel, blues and soul moved everyone within earshot. Students and teachers, school administrators and staff bopped their heads up and down the hall.
Though it is the official music of the nation’s capital, go-go is not exactly young people music. Its legends are aging, its heyday decades gone. D.C. teenagers tend to gravitate more to rap and trap and hip-hop.
But in the halls of D.C. schools like this one, the genre is seeing a revival.
Kids as young as 11 are forming go-go groups in classrooms, recreation centers, their parents’ garages and, in some cases, with the help and mentorship of the very artists who once defined the genre. Tweens who weren’t even born before the grandfather of go-go, Chuck Brown, died in 2012, are finding ways to bring a new spin to a familiar sound and encouraging their friends to look at go-go anew.
“The only way you can preserve something is if the young people take it over,” said Ron Moten, a longtime activist, go-go historian and one of the founders of the Go-Go Museum in Anacostia. “We didn’t have a pipeline for that with go-go until some adults stepped up and said let me help these young people get into this music, get into this history; that’s something they’re missing.”
At a time when adolescents in the District are being more heavily policed, subject to citywide curfews and barred from gathering in large groups following incidents in neighborhoods like Navy Yard, U Street and Chinatown, educators and musicians say go-go can provide a release valve for teens — and a way to get them off the street.
But, first, they need to persuade them to play.
A familiar feeling
Originating in the District’s live-music scene of the 1970s, go-go earned its name from Brown, who said he was trying to keep people on the dance floor with a beat that “just goes and goes.” For decades, go-go has been the soundtrack to D.C. block parties, cookouts, parades and even funerals.
But it wasn’t always seen as a positive outlet for the District’s youth.
In the late 1980s, as go-go was hitting the national scene with appearances in Spike Lee’s film “School Daze” and the success of Go Go Live at the Capital Centre, D.C. lawmakers began to crack down on shows and those who attended them.
The D.C. Council instituted strict curfews on teens who attended go-go shows and openly blamed young Washingtonians for contributing to a rise in crime, violence and drug use in the city. Police raids became the norm as law enforcement was frequently called in to shut down go-go concerts and clear crowds.
“Back then, when you would have problems at the shows, it was never the bands, never the music. It was the extenuating factors that caused the problems — you know, friends coming in with the band, feeling entitled, or people with beef,” said Janice Carroll, who managed the go-go band Jigga in the 1990s and now serves as a student coordinator for the SEED School in Southeast Washington. “It was always the outside stuff that seeped in.”
Several prominent go-go artists who remember the energy in the District back then said they see similarities in the city’s more recent push to crack down on youth following President Donald Trump’s takeover of the city’s law enforcement and heightened anxiety over teenage unruliness.
“There are parallels from then to now, which is that you have some children who are doing the wrong thing and the whole city is going to get slammed for it,” Moten said. “The rest of us, meanwhile, are being indoctrinated with this narrative that young people are bad, young people are dangerous. How many news stories have you seen about the good things these young people are doing? It was the same back then. Always something negative. So as a young person, you start to internalize that. You start thinking that’s the only way you can get attention.”
At 46, Kenny “Kwick” Gross, known for drumming with legendary go-go groups Rare Essence and the Chuck Brown Band, is considered a giant of the genre. But he was just 19 when he started playing with a go-go band — a group of young men from Glenarden, Maryland, called Chalyss.
At the time, he said, even his own father didn’t approve.
But over time, go-go’s image has morphed. In recent years, it has been incorporated into city-sanctioned events, educational programs at D.C. libraries and even inside D.C. schools.
The school district sponsors an annual concert of its all-city Let’s Go-Go band that draws students from around D.C. to participate and practice with visiting artists and then perform.
These days, Gross spends his free time helping the kids at SEED develop their musical ear and acumen. He bounces on the balls of his feet when the kids land an irresistible beat and shouts cues at them over the sound pouring from their instruments.
“I feel like I got to do my best to keep it going,” Gross said after a recent practice. “I mean, the name of the music is go-go — it can’t just stop. And we getting old. So somebody’s got to know how to do this, how to keep it going when we’re finished. And they can’t do that without us helping show them the way.”
The students in Sounds of SEED range in age and ability. Some confidently rotate between four instruments — picking up a bass guitar just moments after putting down drumsticks, or sliding over to the keyboard and singing — while others are just learning to master their first.
The group was among four youth bands competing in a battle of the bands at the Go-Go Museum over the weekend. The winners will be invited to perform at several upcoming concerts: a holiday show in early December and at the Washington Wizards’ annual go-go basketball game. Stars from each group will have an opportunity to perform together at the Go-Go Awards in January in what Moten hopes will be a young person’s tribute to go-go legends the Junkyard Band, Trouble Funk and Rare Essence.
Moten said it will be an opportunity for the genre’s youngest to pay homage to the trailblazers who created go-go’s unique sound, but also a chance to show go-go fans and musicians that the future of the genre is in good hands.
How go-go keeps going
Students say they understand the history of the genre they are stepping into. For many, their musical education has been accompanied by lessons in history and D.C. culture.
“Being young and playing music that’s come down from generations to generations, it’s actually heartwarming to me because I can still learn where the roots were, how the music was created, and what made D.C. D.C.,” Ivy said.
“It feels like a gift, almost,” said London Dailey, 17, also a senior. “It’s like, from the people who played it before, it’s like: Here you go now, you get to experience it and show everybody else how to play it and, you know, spread it throughout your community.”
But these kids want to leave their mark, too. Make go-go in their own image.
At a recent practice at SEED, Dailey announced it was time to play an original song the band has been concocting.
With her hands hovering over the black and white keys of an electric keyboard, Dailey began a run of Ludwig van Beethoven’s seminal Fifth Symphony. Hunched with concentration, she played the four notes the piece is best known for, as sophomore AJ Ellis, 16, kicked in on the drums. The beat was sharp and clean when Tiara Anderson, 15, slid in a complementary riff on the bass.
All at once, the familiar Beethoven refrain was remade into something funky, groovy, unique. Asked what inspired them to transform Symphony No. 5 into go-go, the kids shrugged.
“We heard it going around on Tik Tok,” Dailey said. “And I thought, we could do something different with that.”
At Stuart-Hobson Middle School, a D.C. public school on Capitol Hill, music director BJ Simmons is doing something different with his advanced band class: Turning a group of 16 students into a go-go band called Panther Funk, complete with a brass section, strings, several percussionists and vocalists.
Caleb Johnson, an eighth grader who has been playing trombone since he was 5 years old, said he was skeptical about the go-go program at first. But being in the class has shown him new ways to blend genres to create music, he said, and inspired him to think about it differently.
“I like listening to old music — like Alicia Keys, Anthony Hamilton, Erykah Badu — so it’s cool that we can take something that we already love and combine it with something new to bring it back in a different way,” said Johnson, 13.
Johnson said his friends like to listen to the band as often as they can. Seeing his peers groove to the music between classes lights him up inside. Go-go “is good for the heart,” he said. “It’s heart music.”
During a recent rehearsal, as the sound of Johnson’s trombone swelled, a student walking between classes wandered in. He bounced and shuffled, his feet moving to the drumbeat until he stood at the band’s center, the music pulsing all around him.
Simmons, the teacher, handed him a cowbell and a stick and nodded. The boy began to tap the metal bell in time, as his peers smiled at one another over their instruments.
They played that way for a while, buoyed by the infectious joy of someone who simply couldn’t resist their groove. Eventually, the boy wandered out, abandoning the cowbell on a stool. But the band kept playing.
It’s go-go, after all. That means it has to keep on going — and going.
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