‘Put ya one leg up’: Go-Go and Black Working Class Consciousness Across Two Geographies of Disaccumulation

• In Event: Black Geographies: Vulnerability, Possibility, and Futurity in the U.S. South

Abstract

Go-Go is a distinct genre of highly percussive music that emerged in the 1970’s and 1980’s out of the cultural substrate forged in segregated Black Washington, DC between the 1920’s and the 1970’s. It is the direct product of the infamous alleys and hidden nightlife scene William H. Jones derided in his classic sociological examination of the city’s black leisure activities as well as the innumerable rural Southern towns from Virginia to Georgia that formed the bulk of Chocolate City’s residents. Although often pathologized and criminalized within dominant sociological and criminological paradigms, “go-go’s”—the music itself, its mostly working class audiences, and the venues and sites of the music’s production and consumption—form an alternative archive of geographic knowledge, urbanism, rural knowledge, cosmologies, and ethos, from the vantage of those rendered most vulnerable in the regional operation of racial capitalism. This paper situates go-go and its derision and criminalization within the longer history of sociological practice and reformism in urban black communities to garner purchase on the removal of go-go’s in the processes of gentrification that have reshaped the District since 1990. As well, it uses oral histories and lyrics to excavate go-go’s alternative praxes of place, which encompasses variations on community, belonging, collectivity, and spatial organization. These are usable knowledge sets and histories as we face the aftermath of oil and must begin annealing small-scale relationships outside the confines of capitalism and its attendant modes of dominant territorial organization.

Author

• J.T. Roane, Smith College