Museum dedicated to go-go music will open in D.C. in February

A museum commemorating the history of the District of Columbia’s own musical genre, go-go, will open in the Anacostia neighborhood in February.

“You know we have 80 museums in Washington, D.C., but until today we had one missing. … We are reminded that a people who doesn’t remember its history will lose everything, and so we have to be committed to this museum, we have to be committed to educating our young people and educating our next generation of musicians,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said at Monday’s ribbon cutting.

On X, Ms. Bowser wrote that “Go-Go is DC and DC is Go-Go.” The subgenre of funk was declared the city’s official music in 2020.

The museum’s ribbon cutting coincided with the city’s “Go-Go Preservation Week,” which started Sunday and ends Saturday. 

While a soft launch will allow private tour groups into the Go-Go Museum & Cafe, it will open to the general public on Feb. 19, according to Fox affiliate WTTG.

The museum is the brainchild of Ronald Moten and American University professor Natalie Hopkinson, who launched a petition in 2019 after people in a Northwest condominium pressured a store along U Street to stop playing go-go as it had done since the 1990s.

“We were outraged by D.C. being attacked by gentrifiers,” Mr. Moten told ABC station WJLA.