Chuck Brown and E.U. feature in a Tiny Desk Radio episode on go-go music

NPR has handed an episode of Tiny Desk Radio to go-go, the style that grew up in Washington, DC, and is marking fifty years of it. Hosts Bobby Carter and Anamaria Sayre build the episode out of Tiny Desk performances the series already has in hand, from Chuck Brown, Trouble Funk, Rare Essence and E.U.

NPR's own description of the music is more precise than the usual shorthand. It calls go-go funky music with a slow and simple groove that hides dense polyrhythms and interwoven harmonies inside it, which is a fair account of why a style built on repetition holds attention across a long set.

The four acts are not a random sample. NPR calls them the Mount Rushmore of go-go, and the choice tracks the history: Chuck Brown is the figure the style is usually traced back to, and Trouble Funk, Rare Essence and E.U. carried it through the 1980s, when E.U. reached a national audience the others largely did not.

What makes the episode work as radio is that the source material already exists. Each of those four has played a Tiny Desk concert, so the episode is a rebroadcast of performances rather than a documentary built from interviews, and the music does the explaining.

Practical details are thin by design. NPR gives no air date and tells listeners to look for Tiny Desk Radio on their local NPR station, which is how the strand is distributed. Suraya Mohamed wrote the episode, Walter Ray Watson and Noah Caldwell produced, Lars Gotrich is the series editor, and Kaelin Ellis composed the theme.

Fifty years is an unusually specific anniversary for a regional style, and it has been marked at the Tiny Desk before: we covered E.U.'s own office concert for the anniversary. This episode is the radio version of that, gathering the performances into one place. It sits with the site's other rnb-soul coverage.