From Go-Go Music to Black Displacement: How DC’s Sound Has Been Protected & Fostered Despite Criminalization of Go-Go

Join Allison Fisher from the Globe Collection and Press at MICA and Dr. Natalie Hopkinson, Don’t Mute DC co-founder, activist, and Go-Go scholar, to discuss how the criminalization of Go-Go has shaped the culture and current efforts to protect and foster DC’s sound.

While Go-Go music, a style blending funk with Afri-Latin rhythms, is a style unique to the DMV area, iconic Day-Glo street posters by Globe Poster Co., can be found everywhere from the Smithsonian Institution and dorm rooms to fine art auction houses.

Policies and attitudes long conflating Black urban culture with crime, marginalizing the community for decades, resurfaced when then former Go-Go music promoter, Donald Campbell, was forced to stop playing Go-Go music outside his Metro PCS store due to complaints from neighbors at a new luxury condo development. The Don’t Mute DC movement fought back.