MARC FISHERYou're tuned in to The Kojo Nnamdi Show. I'm Marc Fisher of the Washington Post sitting in for Kojo. And you're listening to the Almanac singers "Which side are you on?" Later this hour we'll talk about D.C.'s drag scene and hear about an exhibit on the Stonewall uprising at the museum. But first, and with the reason you're hearing those Almanac singers, each year the Smithsonian Folklife Festival brings music, art, and food from around the world to the National Mall, but this year's festival is different. It's shorter, more locally focused with a different kind of theme in part because of last winter's federal government shutdown and we'll talk about that.

MARC FISHERThis year's theme is the social power of music, looking at how music builds community as it entertains listeners. And today we're talking with some of the people who are curating and performing at the Folklife Festival, which takes place this year June 29 and 30 on the National Mall. Joining us to talk about it are Sabrina Lynn Motley, Director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Welcome.

SABRINA MOTLEYThank you for having us.

FISHERSojin Kim is Curator of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

SOJIN KIMOne of many curators.

FISHEROne of many.

KIMThank you.

FISHERAnd Kokayi is a D.C. based hip hop and jazz musician.

KOKAYIThank you for having me here.

FISHERAbsolutely. Sabrina Lynn Motley, for people who have never been before, what is the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and how long has it been around?

MOTLEYSo the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is this wonderful beast that takes place every summer on the National Mall at the end of June or the beginning of July. It was founded in 1967 really in a response to the world in which it was produced. The goal was to make the Smithsonian more relatable and accessible and also to give a broader sense of what America meant in terms of its communities and cultures. And I think that that's something that no matter what the size of the festival is or where it is or what the themes are that's something that has carried on throughout the decades.

FISHERAnd while there are tourists in town and I'm sure some people come just for the Folklife Festival, it's substantially a local crowd and always has been. And I've always thought of it as the first test of being a Washingtonian to see if you can sustain yourself through the hot, because it's always the hottest days of the year. I'm sorry, but it's true.

MOTLEYYeah, I know.

FISHERBut this year as you say it is different. It's shorter than normal. It's two days instead of 10. That's a big difference. How did that happen?

MOTLEYSo it happened in part because of the federal shutdown, government shutdown this year. And I know that people want a really juicy story. But the fact of the matter is that it was just about timing. And the shutdown coupled with some timing issues with our partners made us want to take a moment to think about how to best move forward, how to serve our participants and many visitors, who expect to see the festival in the Mall every year. And we wanted to make sure that we had time to do a good job and to honor our past, as well as to honor what I hope will be a rich future.

MOTLEYSo we decided early January that we would not cancel the festival, but do a weekend. And do a really good weekend. And I think that that's what we've managed to put together thanks to the work of people like Sojin and her co-curator, Nicole Procopenco. And, of course, people like Kokayi, who are just stellar.

FISHERAnd next year we get the full festival back?

MOTLEYNext year the full festival is back, 10 days at the end of June, the beginning of July. We'll be looking at issues around cultural knowledge and environmental change. But that said you're going to have a full festival this weekend.

FISHERAnd, Sojin Kim, the theme this year as we mentioned is the social power of music and the schedule has a distinctly Washington feel to it as I look through it. There's go-go and bluegrass and punk. These are all -- it like drew me back to Washington in the 80s and 90s, right? So was that the intent and why such a focus on local music?

KIMSo several things I'd say to that. One is that we had been planning to do a full 10 day program on Washington D.C. as part of a slate of several programs that would focus on and explore the social power of music. We are, as Sabrina mentioned, we're now just down to a half day and really it's just the first Saturday afternoon that we're focusing on Washington D.C. And then Kokayi a D.C. area based musician is going to be part of the evening lineup. But that lineup is actually not exclusively D.C.

KIMBut why D.C.? You know, working with D.C. communities is an extension of what the festival has been doing since 1967. So although we work internationally and nationally we have always -- we live in D.C. We're part of D.C. community so we've always been very invested and invest in working with our neighbors and the communities that we're a part of. This program that I would like to mention will have all of the things that you talked about -- these different genres of music.

MOTLEYBut it's not actually a festival about performances. This is really a festival that's about stewardship. We're thinking a lot about the heavy work and the behind the scenes work and the often undervalued work of preserving and sustaining and stewarding cultural heritage including music. And that's really what the focus of the D.C. part of this will be.

FISHERAnd part of that stewarding, you're getting into an interesting story, which is the controversy that took place with the Don't Mute D.C. movement, which sprang up after the confrontation between some local neighbors and fans of the electronic shop up on U Street that was blasting go-go out to the people who were on the street and had been for many years. And, Kokayi, as you looked at that controversy, how did that connect with where you're thinking about where go-go is today and how much of a kind of living breathing genre it is as compared to, you know, people who look back at it as something of the 80s?

KOKAYIWell, I look at it like this. Go-go music is our product, right? That we export to the world. There are very few forms of indigenous music that exist in this country. You have zydeco. You have second line. You have go-go music where it's very regional very colloquial in what it is, right? And it's part of our intangible cultural heritage that needs to be preserved here in D.C. So when you talk about the fabric of a community of fabric of the city, that fabric doesn't exist without the threads of go-go interweaved into it.

KOKAYIGo-go punk music, hip hop, rock, folk, blues, jazz like those things make up D.C. and go-go in large part, because that is what we created here and it exists here. And when you try to remove that from a cultural space, right, and take that away, you delete some of or whitewash or gloss over or, you know, skip over a portion of our history that needs to be maintained in the city.

FISHERSo this -- the use of the go-go not only the performance, but the discussions that are taking place around the Don't Mute D.C. movement, this doesn't strike me as something that the Smithsonian frequently does in kind of jumping in to a local controversy like that. Was there a discussion around that? Is that a departure from what the Folklife Festival normally does?

MOTLEYSo I guess I would answer in this way. We don't see ourselves jumping into a controversy and taking sides. What we see ourselves doing is really working with community. And the Folklife Festival really has been in response to the communities with which it has worked throughout its history. So our job is to provide a platform for people to tell the stories that matter to them. In this case, with go-go there are many stories to be told. Don't Mute D.C., the current controversy, if you want to call it that, is but one of them.

MOTLEYAnd as Sojin has pointed out and the work that she's doing on the curatorial front. There are many such stories to be told about music in D.C. Obviously, go-go is one of them. It has a rich bluegrass tradition here and jazz. So, again, our job, our mandate really is to stand with communities and to use the festival as a portal through which their stories can be told.

FISHEREarlier this week go-go was in the national spotlight when D.C. natives Regina Hall and members of Rare Essence and EU Experience Unlimited performed at the BET Awards along with a cameo from Taraji P. Henson. Here's a bit of that performance.

FISHERSo, Sojin Kim, as you were thinking about including go-go in this lineup and also punk and also bluegrass, did you see connections among those genres? Is there something that they collectively say about what Washington is or was at various points in the recent decades?

KIMIn terms of who will be coming it's really looking at people that we had started to reach out to. It's people whose work we admired, because they were not simply thinking about music in terms of music as entertainment, but really about music and its role in community practice how it animates our social life, how it animates our ritual life, how it animates our public life. So that's what I see in common among all of them is these are vernacular community based traditions of music and that's what ties them all together.

FISHERAnd there is a representation of punk in the D.C. Public Library's punk and go-go archives will be there giving a workshop on music digitization. Can you tell us a little bit about what the archive looks like and what are people going learn at that workshop?

KIMYeah. Well, the D.C. Public Library has been doing fantastic work to really recognize and encourage people to recognize and contribute in documenting these home grown music traditions. So they have started an archive to which the public has begun to contribute and they are inviting people to continue to come and learn about what they're doing. Contribute their memories. Contribute their materials to the library so that we can make sure that these stories become part of the official public record that can be accessed by future generations.

KIMSo they will offer, if people are interested in donating old flyers or photographs or recordings from D.C. music history, they will offer to digitize these things on sight and people will be able to take away a copy for themselves. They're not losing their memories.

FISHERKokayi, we talked earlier about this theme of the social power of music. Tell us about what social power go-go still has in this city, because you go to some go-go events and it's a much older crowd. But then there's, you know, is there still kind of an organic younger go-go following?

KOKAYIAbsolutely, when you talk about bounce beat, if you talk about Mochila, YadaYada work that they're doing. Tone Pete the work that he's doing, you know, there a lot of things that intersect. So Tony Lewis, Jr. is working with returning citizens, but he also supports a strong D.C. native movement as well as intersecting that with Don't Mute D.C. You have djs like Domo. You have a number of younger folks that are out here that always pay homage to go-go music. You have GoldLink who made an entire record "At What Cost" around his experiences living in this region. So there's definitely a younger generation that admires and loves go-go music and is not just junkyard -- backyard band. It's also UCB, TCB, you know, new impressions. You have bands like that that have come up doing different forms of go-go music. So it's not this one monolith of go-go. It's not just "Do You Know What Time It Is?"

FISHERIt's not all Chuck Brown.

KOKAYIRight. It's not all Chuck Brown. It's not all Old Essence Joints, but it's also newer stuff that's coming out. It's new backyard. It's new TCB. It's new UCB. It's new bands that form daily. So they're keeping the traditions alive while just adding their own voice in it. So when you talk about social power, social movements things of that nature a whole movement started over someone beefing about what was going on at the corner of 7th and Florida. You know what I mean? So it's right there at that intersection where people spark something and young people got together not just the older generation. But younger people got together and said, you know what, they're not going to mute us. They're not going to stop our indigenous music. They're not going to stop our intangible music history and they're not going to let that be erased from our culture.

KOKAYIAnd that's younger people that are standing there similar to, you know, I'm not trying to make all these wild comparisons. But it was younger people that helped with the civil rights movement. It's always -- you know, it's younger people that is infused with the wisdom of the older folks. And they just push those two things together and move in one concentrated consorted effort to make sure that things continue to not necessarily be the same, but that they aren't erased or removed from the history that is our city.

KOKAYII mean, we have currently according to newspapers and, you know, statistics, you know, one of the heaviest gentrified cities right now in the country. And with gentrification sometimes comes an erasure of culture instead of an embracing of culture. And I think that's part of what the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is about the embracing of culture.

KOKAYISo the many years that I have attended Folklife, I've seen things come from different regions. You know, I remember when they were doing this thing on Armenia and Armenian culture. And I have friends that are in France that are Armenian and I told them about it. And they were like, oh, my God you guys are recognizing what we're doing. Similarly, those things -- and, you know, I've seen Sojin and Nicole and Sabrina reach out to our community to make sure that these things that we adhere and are close to and that this culture is also preserved. Not preserved in a way that is locked away in jar, but preserved to be able to be cultivated and used in generations going forward.

FISHERKokayi is a D.C. based hip hop and jazz musician. We're also talking with Sabrina Lynn Motley, the Director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and Sojin Kim who's a Curator at the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. I'm Marc Fisher from the Washington Post. And we'll continue now with a call from Ronnie in Fairfax. Ronnie, you're on the air.

RONNIEOh, thank you. I just wanted to say thank you very much for putting on the Folklife Festival. I've been living in the D.C. area all my life and I've really enjoyed going to them in the past. I'm really looking forward to this year, because it's going to be based on this area. I've always been really interested in, you know, go-go music. But I've never really had the opportunity to check it out. So I'm really looking forward to seeing that on the Mall this year. And thanks again for putting it on. It's really refreshing to have some things from so close to home as opposed to in the past I've seen things from, you know, all parts of the world, which was also nice. But it's easier to relate from things, you know, that are so close to home or within the U.S. That sort of thing.

FISHERAbsolute. Thank you, Ronnie.

MOTLEYThank you. Thank you for that.

FISHERSabrina Motley, one of the joys of the Folklife Festival through the years is interacting with the artists and others who've come from often very remote places around the world. Do you want the artists this year to have that same kind of interaction with people even though they're local and, you know, we might think we know them even if we don't?

MOTLEYYou said it perfectly, yes. We do want to make sure that people have all sorts of interactions with our artists, you know, whether it's conversation. We have evening concerts. So come out with your family and friends and hang out on the grass and listen. I think, again, that closeness that kind of intimacy in exchange is a hallmark of the Folklife Festival no matter what region we're engaging or country. Again, that's really important. And I will say to this idea of, you know, when we do quote/unquote "foreign programs," you know, a lot of the people who live in the U.S. who live in the city come from those areas. So in so many ways they're not foreign. They're not other and I think that's the point is that that wall that seemingly separates us is really not there, and that's what the Folklife Festival can do.

MOTLEYWe are making a commitment to do more national and local programming. We hope that this work that Sojin and Nicole are doing that it will catalyze a whole area of research and engagement around D.C. and the region, that we join others. The Smithsonian clearly is not the only organization that's doing this work, but we want to amplify it. So I think that we're at a really interesting and critical time for the Folklife Festival and it's wonderful to hear that it's being recognized in that way.

FISHERNow "The Social Power of Music" is the theme of the festival, but it's also the name of a book and CD boxset that the Smithsonian put out earlier this year. So where does that fit into the larger strategy of the Smithsonian's year of music and do you see the genres that you've focusing on here in this festival, do you see them as heirs to that sort of folk protest tradition that's so much a part of that social power of music collection?

MOTLEYSo yes. I see that it as heirs. To be clear, the way that we're talking about the social power of music is not just protest music. We're really talking about how music can access whether it's -- again, it's a lullaby. It's a funeral dirge. Obviously it is protest music, but it is that and more and it's really about how music does make those links between people across space and time. So, yes, in many ways, this music is heir to a very rich tradition. And to your point about, you know, the year of music and the box set and, you know, the Smithsonian is one huge big family so we feed each other. And the festival actually did provide inspiration for some of those other activities, which is, you know, very gratifying.

FISHERLet's hear from Frank in D.C. Frank, you're on the air.

FRANKHello, good afternoon. Hi, I'm Frank Agbro and I live in Mount Pleasant. And I'm also a host in Live at Five on WPFW. The other day -- well, some few weeks back I invited a band that usually plays on the Metro. A band called Spread Love and they're a go-go band. And so I had them on the show and then I decided to bring them into the community of Mount Pleasant to perform at a block party, which me and my family organized.

FRANKAnd just to let you know it's been like 22 years that we've been living in this neighborhood and we haven't heard go-go music, which is traditional go-go, you know, D.C. music. And my son is a drummer. He happens to be a drummer and we have a family band. But the thing about it is that he was never exposed to go-go music except if we went to like a mall area, which way back when there was nobody living downtown. It was just like the government building and everything.

FRANKSo the only entertainment tourists and other people would see would be go-go music. You know, because everybody works. At five o'clock they were gone. You know what I'm saying? So I think it's time that we recognize go-go music as an official music although the underground, because I could not believe what happened at the block party. People were dancing, young, old. I don't care who they were, everybody was moving. I had never seen that before. All right.

FISHERGreat. Thank you very much. And just as go-go is something that can be brought to new audiences even within our own community the hip hop scene in the D.C. area hasn't always gotten as much recognition in areas outside the Beltway and even in some areas inside the Beltway, but Kokayi, there is a thriving hip hop scene here. And just last week two Prince George's County rappers Rico Nasty and YBN Cordae made the annual freshman list for the hip hop magazine "XXL". One of the highest honors that an up and coming rapper can get. So what is it that makes music from the DMV unique?

KOKAYIWell, I love D.C. because it's like the crucible, right? If you can make it here you can make it anywhere. I honestly believe that. I mean, D.C. crowds will boo you. They want you to move them.

FISHERTough crowd.

KOKAYIOh, absolutely, but that tough crowd and the lack of industry here makes you feel like and underdog and makes you push like four times as hard to make sure that your art is out there and appreciated and recognized. But hip hop has been in D.C. for as long as hip hop has been around. There was underground crews. You know, I was part of the Freestyle Union. They were the Amphibians. They were the Thunder Cats. There was Questionmark Asylum. You had Infinite Loop. You had a bunch of different groups and crews that all hung out and did hip hop music when it wasn't popular.

KOKAYISo you either topped for a go-go band or you're a hip hop dude. And if you were a hip hop person then you were trying be like bangers from New York, like that's what people would say. But hip hop has been here for a long time. But there's a lot of music that has been here. So go-go music is what got me into music aside from my own family history. But growing up in southwest on the southeast side is what I call it that little sliver of land over in southwest over in southeast, you know, Junkyard was our band that was from the area.

KOKAYIBut at the same time my brother was listening to Bad Brains, right, D.C. based. You know, similar to that, you know, my dad was into jazz music. So, you know, Marvin Gaye or Duke Ellington or anything that was D.C. based, Roberta Flack telling me about the Bohemian Cavern. So this rich music history has always been here. It's just that nationally some things weren't recognized. But if you go back and listen to old hip hop music a lot of go-go samples were in, you know, you had Drop the Bomb that was in whole bunch of different records. You had stuff from Trouble Funk. You had stuff that Salt N Pepper was using to do using in their music.

KOKAYIHitman Howie T was borrowing a lot of stuff from D.C. go-go music. You know, Junkyard Band, their first single was on Deaf Jam. So if you look at it we've always had a rich music scene. We just haven't had a rich music industry meaning that there were record labels here that would help with that infrastructure that would help to push us to a point.

KOKAYISo you always have D.C. artists saying, well, I'm going to put D.C. on the map, right, D.C.'s always been on a map if you just go grab a map it's there. But recognizable D.C. artists have always been making it from here from Citizen Cope to Whaley to Questionmark Asylum. My band, (word?) was one of the first record groups that was signed over in Europe. I remember seeing, you know, singles from my friends over in Europe when I was in France, because we were signed to a French record label. You know, I would see stuff everywhere.

FISHERWe have an email from Ann who says, "As a long time past volunteer at the festival we considered it the hardest, hottest most fun job one could have for no pay, basically a summer camp for adults. These are some of my fondest memories."

MOTLEYThank you, Ann.

FISHERSo a lot of fans, it's a very important piece of D.C. culture. And we have a call from Victor in Tacoma Park along those lines. Victor, you're on the air.

VICTORYeah. So this fits in with the theme of the festival that you're focusing on American music. And my question is have you considered a future program where you have immigrant music that is different, not foreign music, but how different immigrant cultures have kept their music alive here.

FISHERSojin Kim.

KIMThat's a great question and in fact we've been doing that actually since 1967 from the first festival program when there was a lion team from D.C.'s Chinatown participating in the festival. Through the 1970s some of the earliest Southeast Asian refugee communities performed and participated in the Folklife Festival. Even when we have international programs like the Armenia program we always are engaging the diaspora communities, who are showing the way in which they're transforming and expressing in different ways music that they might have learned back home.

FISHERSojin Kim is Curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. We've also been talking to Sabrina Lynn Motley, the Director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and Kokayi, who is a D.C. based hip hop and jazz musician, who will be performing on Saturday at the Folklife Festival. And if you go, it will sound a little bit like this.