Keepin' the Beat: Chuck Brown
HE'S SUCCESSFULLY WORKED the genre he invented for more than 30 years, so you might excuse Chuck Brown, D.C.'s beloved Godfather of Go-Go, if he settled into one groove and never looked back.
But Brown hooked up with producer Chucky Thompson to update his style, and the result dropped this week: "We're About the Business," Brown's first studio go-go album since "Bustin' Loose," captured the beat on wax in 1979. A single, "Chuck Baby," has already garnered heavy local airplay, and he checks in at the 9:30 Club on Friday night.
On the new album, Brown said, he and Thompson were trying to "give go-go not another direction, but another concept, a little more musical and a little more meaningful, lyrics-wise." Thompson, who worked with artists including Mary J. Blige, Nas and The Notorious B.I.G. after an early stint in Chuck's band, steered the songs toward emphasizing storytelling rather than call-and-response catchphrases.
And while "the groove is still there," Brown and Thompson have pared back the percussion enough to let the lyrics shine. "Chuck Baby," for example, takes the live-show mantra "Chuck baby don't give a [rhyming expletive]" and drops it into a narrative of a skeptical young woman being courted by the Godfather himself — which makes it only a little creepy that it's Brown's daughter KK who spits a deft rhyme to counter Chuck's crooning.
The song should make the 9:30 explode when it finds its natural habitat in front of a hyped audience chanting the chorus. Brown expects an excited crowd of both old-school heads and younger folk.
"There's no way in the world that you can go anywhere and get more love than you do here in D.C.," said the Godfather. "I'm just grateful to all of the fans for all these years, and I'm hoping that they like this one, too."
» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; with Familiar Faces, Fri., 9 p.m., $25; 202-265-0930. (U St.-Cardozo)
Written by Express contributor Andrew Lindemann Malone
Photo by Sam Kittner
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