For those who do not know, Baller Alert was born in Washington, DC. The founder, Robin Lyon, is from SE, Washington DC. So go-go is not a trend we tapped into. It is the heartbeat we grew up on, the sound of every cookout, every house party, every block in the city that raised us.
That is why, four years ago, when Live Nation Urban asked Baller Alert to produce a go-go set, we did not hesitate. After the brand went global, we made ourselves a promise to use that reach to put go-go on the same stages the world reserves for everything else it calls great. The first set we produced brought Backyard Band together with Rare Essence, two pillars of the sound sharing one stage. The second paired Backyard with Scarface and Amerie, a Houston rap legend next to the woman whose “1 Thing” carried that go-go bounce straight onto pop radio. The third put Backyard with CeeLo Green, soul meeting the pocket. Every one of them was a swing at the same goal, which is making the rest of the country feel what DC has always known in its body.
This fourth annual go-go set was different. The producers of the Roots Picnic came to us and asked for something bigger, a set built to celebrate 50 years of the genre. That meant we could not lean on one band. We had to build a superband, pulling the best front line voices from across the city and across the eras into one unified show. It was one of the most challenging sets we have ever put together. With the Baller Alert office now in Miami Beach, we tapped Jerry Vines of 1228 Management, who is still on the ground in DC, to help us assemble the legends and lock every moving piece.
We had to get a hometown legend to host, so we called Kenny Burns. Kenny is DC to the core. He came up in the city, started throwing parties as a teenager out of Woodrow Wilson High, and turned that hustle into one of the most respected careers in the business, from his run as an executive at Roc-A-Fella to founding his own label Studio 43, where he signed fellow Washingtonian Wale and put DC hip hop on the national map. They call him the Culture Man for a reason. These days he is still in motion as a brand builder and tastemaker, and he is part of the Baller Alert family as host of our Poli Alert show. No matter how far his name has traveled, he has never stopped repping where he is from.
We were proud to partner with Front Porch on this one. What Noochie built with Live From the Front Porch matters to this culture in a way that is hard to put into words. He started on the actual porch of his family home in DC back in 2017, freestyling into a phone after a frustrating major label run, and turned it into a global platform that has hosted Snoop Dogg, Jill Scott, Patti LaBelle, Chance the Rapper, Anderson .Paak, and the go-go royalty of Backyard Band and Ms. Kim. People have compared it to Tiny Desk, but it is something only DC could have made. He took the District’s official music and carried it to the world without ever letting it leave home. Noochie, thank you for carrying the go-go torch. This set does not happen without you.
The goal was simple and almost impossible at the same time. Get your favorite front line voices from different bands onto one stage. Some had previous engagements and could not make it, but the ones who showed up showed all the way out.
Tre from UCB hit the stage first with “Sexy Lady,” and the timing could not have been louder. UCB’s 2005 classic has been at the center of a national conversation ever since Lizzo teased her own version of it, speeding the record up and stripping out the bounce beat drums that make it what it is. The DMV has been split on whether that song should be touched at all, because some records are sacred. So when Tre performed it live, with the band, the way it was built to be heard, it landed like a statement. This is what the real thing sounds like.
Then came the legends. Big G and Sweet Thang represented Backyard Band, the group whose sound has carried the modern era. Sugar Bear brought EU, the man behind “Da Butt,” the record that put go-go in a Spike Lee film and into the national memory for good. Rappa Dude held it down for Northeast Groovers. Scooby Da God Son and Derrick Holmes brought Sirius Vybe. Miss Kim, the Queen of Go-Go, brought the Kim Michelle Experience. Go-Go Mickey represented Rare Essence, one of the founding institutions of the entire genre.
And then there was Big Tony. Trouble Funk took that stage and we got to pay homage to one of the most important bands this music has ever produced. Formed in DC in 1978, Trouble Funk helped build go-go from the ground up with records like “Pump Me Up” and “Drop the Bomb.” Behind only Chuck Brown himself, they are the most sampled act go-go has ever created. Public Enemy built “Fight the Power” on their sound. The Beastie Boys laced “Paul’s Boutique” with them. LL Cool J, Kurtis Blow, 2 Live Crew, Dr. Dre, and Snoop have all reached for Trouble Funk records, and the Hip Hop Museum put them in its Hall of Fame. Half the breakbeats that built hip hop trace back to a stage in Washington, and Big Tony was standing on ours.
We made sure to honor the ones who got us here. We paid tribute to Little Benny, the trumpet player and lead talker from Little Benny and the Masters whose voice defined a generation of the sound, and to Chuck Brown, the Godfather, the man who created the beat in the first place. Fifty years of go-go is fifty years of names like theirs, and you do not celebrate the anniversary without calling them out loud. And while the band played, the DMV’s own Demont “Peekaso” Pinder stood on that stage and painted a live portrait of Chuck Brown in real time, the Godfather taking shape in color while his children carried his beat. Pinder has spent years documenting Black music with a brush, serving as the resident artist at DC’s historic Howard Theatre, and there was nobody more fitting to put Chuck on canvas in front of the world.
This is the fourth time Baller Alert has produced a go-go show, and it will not be the last. We come from this. Putting go-go on the Roots Picnic stage in front of the whole country, in the year it turns 50, was never just a booking to us. It was a homecoming.
