Hip-Hop And Go-Gogo Comparison

Hip-hop and go-go music are instrumental in storytelling and memorializing the social and cultural history of urban spaces. In hip-hop the lyrics flow together to tell its listeners a story, more than often about their community and neighborhood that they are from. Hip-Hop creates spatial categories and identities. Hip-Hop constructs place and space through style, lyrical content, images, and dance. It reduces the spatial scale of cities by reducing the broad, general city to a more localized spaces such as blocks, and neighborhoods. In hip-hop, artists continually call out streets and what the particular area was like at the time. For example, Jay Shells, videos provides an example of Warren G rapping about some boys shooting dice on a particular street. The lyrics implies that that space was a place for people in their community to hang out and hold conversations. Hip-Hop is even more specific, with explicit references to particular streets, boulevards and neighborhoods, telephone area codes, postal service zip codes” to construct space and identity (Forman, 18).
Hip-Hop music videos even further leave …show more content…
Go-Go music incorporates diverse voices into the representations, meanings, and uses of urban space. The Go-Go economy reflects limited choices that people endure. It was created specifically for the D.C. area opposed to Hip-Hop. Go-Go music describes a “block-by-block [and] neighborhood-by-neighborhood focus (Hopkinson, 36). Go-Go music includes call and response chants to “draw the geographical map of black Washington” with performances (Hopkinson, 41). The call and response of various neighborhoods makes everyone feel included. For example, Ron stated that he doesn’t necessarily play Go-Go to hear it but in order to let “everyone know I’m from up this way” (Hopkinson, 119). He does this to prove his identity and authenticity. Interestingly, go-go music sounds does change over