I've never done the computer thing before
and I'm not going to do it too much tonight,
but I need it to DJ.
So there might be a bit of DJing going on with this spot.
Because I'm assuming that everyone here
knows what Hip-Hop.
Oh.
It's great to be here.
[LAUGHING]
And it's great because when we came from dinner, we drove up.
And I was rushing into the little apartment.
But I could see the bodies and the silhouettes
and I could hear the music.
And I think maybe, in that moment,
I realized maybe that's what I'm supposed to do,
to be that kind of an ambassador for our vanishing folk culture.
That is where, happens where I come from, Washington, DC.
I don't know if you know a whole lot about Washington, DC.
Maybe I can throw in some tidbits about it.
I mean, really know about it, other
than being the seat of the nation's capital
city, the government, all that kind of stuff.
But, you know, it's highly taxed and has very little
representation in Congress.
So there's a non-voting delegate,
what we call a shadow Senator.
We didn't have home rule right, until the early 70s, maybe?
Walter E. Washington, the first mayor.
You should know that.
You've all heard of Marion Barry, right?
Yes.
He's only our second mayor at the time.
You realize that.
Oh, sorry, second non-congressional
appointed mayor, one that we voted for.
So it's taken some time.
And then after that, the control board took over.
So DC, there's a bit of a, I could call it lots of things.
[LAUGHING]
Apartheid going on there.
We come from that and this music comes from that.
And this music that we're going to talk about,
this percussive, it's a percussive response,
right, from the actual indigenous
natives, the poor people who live there, OK?
The people who do the, as Walt Whitman said in an essay
called On Slang, the people who do their living
and dying closest to the ground.
Those folk.
OK.
So let me try.
Here we go.
So you know what Hip-Hop is.
Raise your hand if you know what Hip-Hop is.
Come on.
Right.
Exactly.
[LAUGHING]
Raise your hand if you knew what Go-Go is.
Really.
Before today.
Right?
All right.
Good.
I like that.
It has to be that way.
That's my-- there'd be no work to do.
OK.
So you know, let's try it.
OK.
Here.
We go I don't know where to start.
OK.
Listen.
This is Doug E. Fresh speaking about Godfather of Go-Go, Chuck
Brown.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- Yo, what's up, y'all.
This is Doug E. Fresh.
And when I think about Chuck Brown,
his history is unbelievable.
And that's why I say every time I go to DC,
and whenever I'm there, we will always
show respect and honor the one and only,
the godfather of Go-Go, Chuck Brown.
That's why every town we go, and every town we
rock, the head, wind me up, Chuck.
Wind me up, Chuck.
So that's how we do it.
I remember one night at the Capitol Center.
20,000.
I did not know Chuck Brown.
I did not know him like that.
When I got to the Capitol Center, Run DMC said,
if you've never seen Chuck Brown,
he's about to change your life.
And when he got on that night.
He changed my life.
[END PLAYBACK]
That was the beat box Doug E. Fresh speaking about--
I know you don't know who Chuck Brown is yet,
but this is all going to make sense soon.
I'm going to do it like a poet.
This is Chuck Brown's voice.
I want you to hear what he sounds like.
This is him offering a definition
of sort of the matrimony between Go-Go and Hip-Hop.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- If I make a mistake, we back it up, right?
All right.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I want to do some hollering.
Y'all do the following.
Let's do some gathering.
And then we all do some hollering.
We're going to bebop it in, crock it in, flip-flop it in,
hip-hop it in, DJ jock it in.
You can't knock it in, just pocket in.
Sock it in.
When your rocket in, you got it locked in.
BEBOP IT in, crocket in, flip-flop it in, hip-hop it in,
DJ jock it in.
You can't knock it in.
Just pocket in.
Sock it in.
When you rock it in, you got it locked in.
[END PLAYBACK]
That's the epigraph.
Bebop it in, crock it in, flip-flop it in, hip-hop it in,
DJ jock it in, you can't knock it in, just pocket in, sock it
in, when you rock it in, you got it locked in.
One.
The real answer to what Go-Go is is right there,
hyphenated in its name.
G-O, hyphen, G-O. Go-Go simply means to keep going,
to be continuous.
Not in the, and you don't stop way, but in the don't stop.
Don't stop.
I'll tell you when, way.
That's Rare Essence, 1979.
In the same way that rap is led by an emcee,
Go-Go is governed by a lead talker.
What is Go-Go governed by?
Lead talker.
Remember that.
Talker.
Right?
[LAUGHING]
A talker, not a rhyming speaker, who leads the band.
Speaking bandleader.
During what we now call the Golden Age of Go-Go,
1976 to 1986, the lead talker was
responsible for dispensing community news
to an audience, which was made up
of folks who lived within an all black city, within quadrants.
That's what we call them in DC.
Wards and quadrants.
Northwest.
You know if you've been to DC, Northeast, Southwest,
Southeast, with the Capitol building sitting
right in the middle of the city, right?
And all the avenues coming from it.
If you stand on Capitol Hill you can look around and see down
on the city, which is designed after Paris, right?
All right.
A good lead talker being a band leader
had to have a side to him that was also part hype man.
How many people know that expression, hype man?
You could figure out what it means.
Think allegorically, the hype man.
Imagine Public Enemy's Flavor Flav
minus the mixture of gesturism and two-face signifying.
The primary responsibility of the lead talker
is to syce the crowd.
How many know that term, to syce the crowd?
To syce?
What does it sound like it means?
Syce?
Syce.
S-Y-C-E. Just think about it.
Think in terms of slang.
To excite?
To excite, right?
Syce, right?
Syce the crowd.
Where was I?
While guiding the band through any number of grooves
and changes and bridges to cross.
In his now legendary and groundbreaking recording,
Bustin' Loose, Chuck Brown asked his band, The Soul Searchers,
for the bridge a record 13 times.
Give me the bridge, now, give me the bridge now, now, now.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I hope you're noticing a similarity in the songs.
What's underneath?
- (RAPPING) Need what you got until you get what you need,
y'all.
This is 1979.
Hear that organ?
- (RAPPING) You got to give a lot just to get what you need
some times, y'all.
Give me the bridge now!
(SINGING) I feel like busting loose.
Busting loose.
Give me the bridge now!
[END PLAYBACK]
Give me the bridge now.
And by my count, 13 is more times
than James Brown, the man who popularized the bridge
and taking it to the bridge, ever asked for it in one song.
It's true.
James Brown was Chuck Brown's idol, of course.
So being a Brown, he was going to always be second, of course.
It's also important to consider the bridge as a metaphor.
What actually happens beneath bridges, and at what time
in DC cultural and political history
the bridge is being asked for?
The Go-Go bridge, going (SINGING) bah, bah, bah, bah,
bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah,
bah, and its new percussive instrument of crossing,
the Remo Rototom, came into its go-go height right around 1982,
the same time Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
declared, "Don't push me because I'm close to the edge.
I'm trying not to lose my head."
[LAUGHTER]
It's like a jungle sometimes.
Come on now.
Y'all go to do this with me.
I ain't up here by myself.
Look who I got with me.
OK.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
During the Golden Age and probably due to a nod to its
parents, Gospel and Funk, the Go-Go bridge was accompanied
by horns, most notably a screaming trumpet--
[TRUMPET SOUND]
--and a Hammond B3 organ, a standard traditional Go-Go
bridge goes a little something like this.
If a groove was being played, then the drummer
rolled out of it.
[DRUM ROLL SOUND]
A long roll around the toms, then straight to the snare.
[SNARE SOUND]
One stick in hand there, while the other stick tipped in hand
drove the cymbals--
[CYMBAL SOUND]
--non crashing from above.
A foot placed itself in a sock.
But the sock was more like a sack and a belly,
the belly of the bass drum, blanket, sleeping cinder block,
or brick.
The spaces between the bass bottom
and the snares' sharp mid slap were left for the bass guitar
to become liquid, to become a funky rubber.
To, in fact, lead this build up of a march from the center
rear.
Keep in mind that terrible things happen on bridges.
In war, they get blown and destroyed.
And in cultural movements and in times of crisis,
they get blocked.
The terrible thing that happened,
the terrible thing that happened at the end of the most
Golden Age Go-Go bridges was the synthesizer.
Particularly the infamous Minimoog,
with its various form of sonic sneezes, shards, and debris.
Listen again, if you will, to Trouble Funk's "E Flat Boogie"
and "Drop the Bomb" for the evidence of such percussive
calamity.
But the bridge is not really as important in Go-Go
as to what happens after the bridge.
Because after the build up, after the construction,
deconstruction, after reconstruction,
after every instrument on stage is
crossed from one side of the groove to the other,
after the C natural debris and the rototoms
of the forthcoming--
[DRUM SOUND]
--silver age of Go-Go have had their say,
after the lead talker declares the whole house safe by asking,
was that safe y'all?
(SINGING) Can we do it again?
Yeah, I want to back it on up.
[SNAPPING]
One more time.
[SNAPPING]
Two more times.
[SNAPPING]
After all of that street and theater and church,
after all that, this is funny.
In the song "Bustin' Loose," Chuck Brown, after the bridge,
asked after the bridge he asked his band, shall I, come on.
Y'all say, roach them on down.
Can I-- see you asking can you take us to the bridge
and the band responds,
Roach them on down.
Now what do you think roach them on down means?
Think about it.
[LAUGHING]
After all that roaching them on down,
the bright moment in "Bustin' Loose," the thing that the LP
cover visually captures so well, and the thing
that distinguishes Go-Go from Hip-Hop from Funk, from Reggae,
from Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, from sunrise space
is the place, from flashlight, after the [INAUDIBLE] bridge,
the pocket.
Where we would eventually need some money.
And where rap, too would learn to vocally ride
in songs like Salt n Pepa's "Shake your Thang"
and Kurtis Blow's "Paty Time," the pocket was born.
What's on here?
What was born?
The pocket.
[LAUGHING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Count the instruments.
Imagine it as a grammar, a conversation right
now between a drummer and a conga player.
How many congas do you hear?
Two Big Belly congas and two Junior LPs.
What are they saying, what could you say over that?
Would you just talk a rap?
Talk?
I would say, it was really good having dinner with you tonight.
[LAUGHING]
Praise.
You got a lot of names.
Good to see you, big brother.
All you people sitting in the back in the cheap seats,
try not to move your feet too wild
because the cops are out front and they watching you all.
Anything goes.
Good to see you, Cybele.
Right on, Hannah.
How about you, the people, young brother there, with a high top,
bush fade.
[LAUGHTER]