Photo by Photos by Chip PyCity Paper’s Arts Desk occasionally features musings from D.C. rapper Head-Roc, who on Friday wrote fervently about what he sees as the burgeoning return of go-go music.
Head Roc stamps go-go the “original funk expression from the people of Chocolate City,” but says it’s been marginalized over the years, an artifact of crooked stereotypes.
The rapper plugs “Evolution of the Go-Go Beat in Washington, D.C.,” an event this afternoon at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. A go-go band is performing live.
Head Roc’s post reminded me of my neighbor, the Uline Arena. In what feels like some unspoken cultural rule, the Uline’s rich history is almost always classically narrated with a lede that plugs the Beatles, peppered with references to the various sports teams that called the venue home. A more obscure part of its history reveals that in the 1970s and 1980s, the Uline was probably best known for go-go shows.
The arena hosted Chuck Brown, Trouble Funk and Rare Essence.
In a 1998 issue of Take Me Out to the Go-Go, Richard O ‘Connor wrote about the prevalence of these shows at the Uline, which was also known as the Washington Coliseum: “Cheap rent, large size, decent acoustics, and a true inner city location that was accessible to everyone made the Coliseum a perfect location for early Go-Go shows. … Today, the old Coliseum stands as a monument — or eyesore — to many bygone eras. If those walls could talk, I bet they would say that Trouble Funk ‘outcranks’ those sorry Beatles any night of the year.”
