Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate 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.

Arts & Photography

Hopkinson, Natalie

Music

Duke University Press Books

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.

Two smart Black women break the Tyrone code with affection, with respect, but with no illusions. Black men as fathers, sons, teachers, lovers, rap stars, professionals, fantasy objects, and cultural constructs a multifaceted picture of American Black men today. You know Tyrone. Smooth-talking, irresistible Tyrone the swagger in his step, the sexy drawl, the poetry and rhythm in his essence the militant revolutionary of the 1960s evolved into the pimp/thug of the hip-hop era. Tyrone is the Black man seen through the media lens, through stereotype, through the eyes of Black women. He’s "Talk Show Tyrone," all muscle and defiance, an archetype converted to a hit single.” In Deconstructing Tyrone, the authors, journalists Natalie Y. Moore and Natalie Hopkinson, examine Black masculinity from a variety of perspectives, looking not for consensus but for insight. With chapters on Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, on the complicated relationship between women and hip-hop, on babydaddies, on gay Black men on and off the down low, on strippers and their fathers, on Black men in the office, at school, and in jail, Deconstructing Tyrone presents a multifaceted picture of American Black men now.

Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation

Politics & Social Sciences

Moore, Natalie Y.

Social Sciences

Cleis Press

Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award A deeply felt and passionately expressed manifesto.” Kirkus Reviews (starred) A meditation in the spirit of John Berger and bell hooks on art as protest, contemplation, and beauty in politically perilous times As people consider how to respond to a resurgence of racist, xenophobic populism, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled tells an extraordinary story of the ways art brings hope in perilous times. Weaving disparate topics from sugar and British colonialism to attacks on free speech and Facebook activism and traveling a jagged path across the Americas, Africa, India, and Europe, Natalie Hopkinson, former culture writer for the Washington Post and The Root, argues that art is where the future is negotiated. Part post-colonial manifesto, part history of British Caribbean, part exploration of art in the modern world, A Mouth Is Always Muzzled is a dazzling analysis of the insistent role of art in contemporary politics and life. In crafted, well-honed prose, Hopkinson knits narratives of culture warriors: painter Bernadette Persaud, poet Ruel Johnson, historian Walter Rodney, novelist John Berger, and provocative African American artist Kara Walker, whose homage to the sugar trade Sugar Sphinx electrified American audiences. A Mouth Is Always Muzzled is a moving meditation documenting the artistic legacy generated in response to white supremacy, brutality, domination, and oppression. In the tradition of Paul Gilroy, it is a cri de coeur for the significance of politically bold—even dangerous—art to all people and nations.

A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance

The New Press

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Books by Hopkinson, Natalie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hopkinson, Natalie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City

Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City

Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation

A Mouth Is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five Continents, and the Art of Resistance