From Atlanta Blackstar:
The “Lemon” performer recently had a more than 40-minute discussion with legendary record producer Rick Rubin all about music in various forms. But when the conversation turned to go-go music and its roots, viewers of the GQ-hosted chat raised their eyebrows.
“Go-go was the second sound of Virginia,” the 46-year-old Virginia native told an amazed Rubin in GQ’s “Epic Conversations.” “It was everything. Everything … It’s such a pocket that if you go outside of D.C. — north-wise, like to New York — you wouldn’t know anything about it. But when you go down south, you can find some of it in Delaware, you can find a little bit of it in Maryland, but not much. And in Virginia, it was just big. In the Carolinas it was big. It was a world. It’s a world.”
But Williams’ diminishing the amount of go-go music flowing from Maryland, which envelopes D.C. where the funk subgenre emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, had many social media users scratching their heads.
You know what? Maybe, when he says Maryland, he’s thinking about it from an entire state perspective — other than the surrounding D.C. suburbs and (with vitriol) Baltimore, maybe Maryland wasn’t big on the sound. In contrast, I can think of all of the times I travelled to different parts of Virginia from North Carolina to see a Go-Go during my college years. Either way, it’s a hilarious misunderstanding.
