A crowd gathers at the official ribbon-cutting ceremony of the city’s Go-Go Museum and Café in the city’s historic Anacostia district on Monday in Washington, D.C. Go-Go music is the official music of the nation’s capital, and the museum is a celebration and preservation of the music and a tribute to its pioneers.
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.
The noise flowing from the speakers outside the store was the sound of go-go music, an outgrowth of funk music born in the nation’s capital. When T-Mobile informed store owner Donald Campbell that he would need to turn off the music due to a potential lawsuit over the sounds that he has played since the ’90s, a throng of residents and supporters organized protests on the corner to demand go-go returned to Georgia and Florida avenues.
Eventually, T-Mobile acquiesced. Campbell was allowed to play his beloved music outside of his store again. Utilizing the hashtag #DontMuteDC , an online petition and the steady beat of go-go, the protesters showed the world that the sound of the district would never be silenced.