It’s been the rhythmic African American underbelly of Washington DC for half a century, as culturally important as jazz in New Orleans, country music in Nashville or rock’n’roll in Memphis.

Yet go-go, a foot-stomping, drum-based fusion of funk, rap and R&B, has – barring a brief championing by sections of the British music press in the mid-1980s – rarely been heard outside the clubs, churches and street corners of its DC heartland. That is, until now.

In an unprecedented piece of legislation, go-go music will be recognised next year as the US capital’s official sound – meaning new investment, grassroots support and potentially much bigger audiences.

“Generations of people have grown up with go-go – it’s in our blood,” says Andre “Whiteboy” Johnson, a go-go musician for more than four decades.

Washington might be a place that many associate with the White House and not much else, but Johnson insists the city has always been a hub of “exceptional communities and exceptional music”. His band, Rare Essence, is one of the leading acts on the circuit, playing at least three shows a week. They learned their art, he says, from the “godfather of go-go” himself, the late Chuck Brown.

Brown didn’t just invent go-go, says Johnson, he reinvented what dance bands do. “It’s non-stop. We go from one song to the next to the next – there’s no break,” he says.

That’s where the name go-go derives – it’s music with a beat that just goes and goes. Percussive solos are its signature – conga drums, cowbells, timbales, anything with a beat. These transitions between songs turn into crescendos that keep the dance floor buzzing. “That was Brown’s genius,” says Johnson.

It’s those pulsating links between songs that raise go-go to an almost religious live experience, he says.

“We do shout-outs to the audience. It’s exhausting, hot, sweaty – but it’s an incredible party.”

Andre “Whiteboy” Johnson, left, and his band Rare Essence. Photograph: Brian Liu

Not everyone has seen it that way. In the early 1990s, when Washington was the murder capital of America, the go-go scene acquired a reputation – unfairly, insist many – for violence. Most notoriously, a man was shot and killed during a Chuck Brown gig in 1992. The police cracked down, introducing curfews and bans on alcohol inside clubs. Venues were shut down if there was even a sniff of trouble.

“Go-go was criminalised,” says Natalie Hopkinson, who wrote the book Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City. She says the genre was scapegoated because some of the violence happened around go-go venues. “But violence happened everywhere – the guns had nothing to do with the congas, the cowbells, the horn section, the lead talker, the dancing, all these beautiful things that make go-go music.”

The crackdown forced the music underground, Hopkinson says. But go-go never went away. “The thing that’s really amazing about it is its strength, its vitality despite all these challenges,” she says.

With the turn of the century, the drug battles abated and Washington lost much of its bad-boy image. A new contingent of well-heeled Americans moved into town, pushing up property prices and “turning DC into the most aggressively gentrifying place in America”, according to Hopkinson. That would become the next new threat for go-go.

“Gentrification is one of these areas where you can see some of the old faultlines come back,” Hopkinson says. Once staunchly African American communities, the spiritual hub of go-go music, were gradually “whitening”.

“Where a go-go club used to be, there was a high-rise condo or a designer doughnut shop, that’s how it worked,” says Rare Essence’s Johnson. “They were trying to push go-go out.”

Things came to a head in spring this year, when a resident of a new condo in the Shaw district – a formerly poor part of the city – complained that the go-go music being blasted out from a local corner store was too loud. The owner had been promoting his store for 25 years by playing go-go, Johnson explains. When he was forced to turn it off, “all hell broke loose”.

A DontMuteDC protest in Washington. Photograph: Don't Mute DC

Go-go fans from all over DC converged on the area to demonstrate, and the battle cry DontMuteDC was born as a hashtag on social media.

“It became a movement that tapped into the issue of displacement,” says Sojin Kim, a curator at the Smithsonian museums.

People who had never heard of go-go, let alone listened to it, suddenly wanted to know all about it, she says. It became a campaign that other gentrifying cities could relate to – New Orleans and Los Angeles especially. “It put go-go on the map.”

At the 2019 BET awards, a huge national TV event in America, the Washington DC-born actress and comedian Regina Hall, who was hosting the event, performed a tribute to go-go by spoofing a Beyoncé video.

They ran the hashtag DontMuteDC right across the screen. “It was phenomenal,” says Kim, who is now working on an oral history of go-go and the DontMuteDC movement that will be showcased by the Smithsonian next year.

For Johnson, the national recognition is a long time coming but a “really big deal” nonetheless. His band is collaborating next year with the rapper Snoop Dogg – another indication of how go-go is winning new friends.

“It’s crazy to think people wanted to silence us,” he says. “That could never happen. Go-go’s the soul of this city.”