The Go-Go Museum & Cafe

The Go-Go Museum & Café opened its bricks & mortar location on Feb. 19th, 2025 to regular hours. Part Hard Rock Café, part Tiny Desk recording studio, part “Black Mirror,” the museum is hard to pin down—kind of like the Black popular music form it celebrates. Sixteen digital interactives (including AI-powered holograms of popular musicians) immerse visitors in the story of how Go-Go Godfather Chuck Brown created the sound that blends elements of funk and hip-hop.

Hear music by the other Founding Fathers of Go-Go: Rare Essence, Trouble Funk, Experience Unlimited, as well as the many waves of go-go that came after. Junkyard to Backyard Band, Northeast Groovers, to the Grown & Sexy and Bounce Beat waves, as well as the role of women in “Ladies to the Front.” The Café’s Diaspora street food menu tells the music’s parallel journey through food. Visitors can peruse artifacts such as DJ Kool’s touring jacket, Little Benny’s horn and EU’s 50-plus-year catalogue.

Kid-friendly interactives transform their selfies and street art into custom-made T-shirts. The museum is part of a growing hub of Black-owned businesses in the city’s historic Anacostia neighborhood, along the same riverbanks where the Anacostan tribes traded hundreds of years ago.

Learn about go-go’s Afro-modern origins, and its impact on the city’s politics and cultural economy. Digital artifacts show how go-go survived criminalization and how the Don’t Mute DC movement created the museum.