D.C.’s Go-Go Museum Honors The City’s Beloved Music Legacy

In 2019, a tenant of a luxury apartment building in the Shaw neighborhood in Washington, D.C., complained of constant noise emanating from a MetroPCS storefront nearby. With the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the highly-anticipated Go-Go Museum and Café in D.C.’s historic Anacostia neighborhood Monday, the museum’s creators have cemented go-go’s place in the lineage of Black liberation music — from Komfa in Guyana, Candomblé in Brazil, and Santería in Cuba. There’s certain things that happen to Black people wherever we are, whether it’s in Cuba or Brazil or Jamaica or anywhere,” said Dr. Natalie Hopkinson, the museum’s chief curator and author of “Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City.” “Go-go music is just one of these manifestations of that Afro-modern existence that we have, that we’ve turned our pain into power,” she said. “We have over 80 museums in Washington, D.C., but until today, we had one missing,” Bowser told the large crowd of go-go supporters who attended the museum’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. A crowd gathers to hear the Junk Yard Band and the Back Yard Band at the official ribbon-cutting ceremony of the city's Go-Go Museum and Café on Monday in Washington, D.C. Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images An exhibit dedicated to the #DontMuteDC movement “shows how we very specifically took the pain of that gentrifier on that corner, God bless her, who sparked this movement because that’s why we have a museum,” Hopkinson continued.