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Go Go Music : The Problem Of Go-Go Music

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If you live in the D.C. metro area, there’s a fairly high chance that you may have heard go-go music. You may have been walking down the street in D.C. and heard people banging on trash cans and not even realized what kind of music it was.
A Home to a well educated black middle class because of institutions like Howard University, DC, unfortunately, experienced a similar urban issue that was the same as with many US cities beginning in the late 1960s. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., “the segregation-era black enclave around U Street was left gutted by rioters, a trauma felt through subsequent decades” (Miller, 2012). DC had an influx of black people and poorer people as the middle-class residents left for the suburbs. With a declining tax base, “the city's schools and service institutions could do little to counteract the atmosphere of hopelessness and frustration pervasive in poor black neighborhoods” (Miller, 2012).
In the early 1970s, musical pioneer Chuck Brown started to lie down the foundations of what is now called go-go music. The music was “driven by teenage musicians and audience members, the music was heavily inspired by funk, blues, soul, and salsa” (Reynolds, 2015). Go-go is typically identifiable because of its syncopated polyrhythms and the use of multiple percussion instruments. Initially, “"go-go" was the term used to identify the place where young people were partying” (Reynolds, 2015). Eventually, the music itself took on the name and
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