Shutting off the outside go-go music at a cell
phone store once it got bought up by a corporate outlet has been a
gentrification flash point in DC. Sadly, it might be too late. But folks came
out in abundance this past week to play go-go music loud as fuck and gather and
be like “hell nah” in the public space.
Chuck Brown is the Godfather of go-go, a legit
godfather of it so that you have to capitalize the “g”, it’s not just talking
conjecture. Hate to think DC is too far gone to where one day there’ll be a
statue of Chuck Brown outside of some vegan Mongolian BBQ joint operated by
three wealth-adjacent young white adults from Massachusetts who relocated
there, and trademarked their combination of consumption of other cultures
because they somehow thought that was legally original. They will say they
learned Mongolian vegan BBQ from a grandmother, and pretend that their
absorption of other cultures is an actual culture to own in and of itself,
specifically legally. And these people’s grandchildren, who were raised in the
shadow of the Chuck Brown statue, will claim go-go music is their culture, 35
years from now, when all of DC has been sterilized entirely and is a stainless
steel mural projected blitzkrieg of “multi-cultural” single-economic class
(upper) revitalization/post-modern trail of tears.
Locally, there is an article circulating about an
apartment building few blocks from my house, one of the few affordable housing
spaces left in the neighborhood, but too close to the bougie restaurants I
guess, and everybody is being evicted in order to “make renovations”. A block
away a giant mural pretending there’s a wood mill where people where derbies
and drink pint glasses of beer after work catches my attention as I walk to
catch the free trolley to work downtown. Inequality is being compounded
everywhere in this country right now, at an alarming rate, all while people are
pretending the economy is great and things are better than ever. (Who is
pretending this exactly depends on which set of suits has gotten elected, but
one or the other of them is always saying everything is fine – never do they
agree to the reality the rest of us see, which means the hopeless keep
entrusting political conmen who say “I’m gonna change all this!” who hand us a
softball and we throw it at the peach basket and it bounces out onto the floor
again and we still lack any prize with our rube mark asses.
It is always the progressive and inclusive who are
on the front lines of this inequality in urban areas. I mention trademarking
shit up above because of the fire cider controversy, where three young white
adults wealth adjacent trademarked an old ass shared public recipe, and because
the government patent office is a bureaucratic organization full of the same
ineptitude such a thing has always had (America is no exception), they own “fire
cider” and have legally enforced that on others. These people think they did no
wrong, and also think they are conscious and woke and beneficial to the larger
human biosphere. It takes obliviousness to help drive us all to oblivion. And
we are moving there rapidly. Without fucking go-go music. Goddammit.
But fuck it. It’s Friday, I am a natural born dirtgod, one who resides in the
larger DMV footprint aka the go-go belt, so I might leave work early as fuck,
throw on some Rare Essence mixes, cook some fuckin’ leg quarters up, and sit
under the eave out of the drizzle in my shitty ass $800 a month basement
apartment on a month-to-month lease, sipping on a San Pellegrino sober man’s
40, and try to enjoy my goddamn doomed life for a few minutes, before the human
wolves start closing further in.
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