Go-go music turns fifty this year, and Prince George’s County, Maryland – the genre’s ancestral home – is not letting that pass quietly. “PG Bama (The Go-go Anthem)” is the work of Frank Cisco “STEEL” Anderson and Lavell “Magnus” Copeland, two PG County lifers who recorded this track in a basement during a snowstorm, streets frozen outside, everything inside running hot. STEEL is an Amazon bestselling author, disabled Naval officer veteran, and the creator of the Amerisoca genre; Magnus is an award-winning performer, producer, and engineer with live-band instincts that you can feel in how the track breathes. The song is also a promise kept: it’s dedicated to their late sister DJ K-la, who died of cancer – the same disease STEEL is currently fighting as an outpatient at Johns Hopkins. None of that backstory is incidental. All of it is in the music.
Go-go has always been survival music. From Chuck Brown’s “Bustin’ Loose” to E.U.’s “Doin’ the Butt”, it’s a genre built on call-and-response, on communal sweat, on the idea that a beat shared is a burden lightened. “PG Bama” sits squarely in that lineage while pushing it forward – it’s ancestral in its bones but futuristic in its execution, the kind of track that nods to where the culture came from without being a museum piece. The decision to record it in a PG County basement rather than a polished studio wasn’t logistical; it was spiritual. The DNA of the DMV needed to be inside the recording, not approximated from a distance, and it is.
What makes this more than a celebratory anthem is the weight underneath it. Joy as an act of rebellion is a real thing – the deliberate choice to move when grief would have you still, to make noise when silence would be easier. Dem Boyz from Gorgeous understand that, and “PG Bama” sounds like it. Fifty years of go-go music deserved a proper statement for the anniversary. This is one.