“Go-go music’s had a profound affect on me, just because it’s so uncompromising. And if that’s in your bloodstream, it’s hard to get it out — even if you wanted to. But I’m glad it’s there.” — Scott Sanders
Reagan Bombs — the eclectic duo of screenwriter/director Scott Sanders and DJ/producer Jesse Tittsworth — have created one of this year’s single-best works of art.
Released by Washington, D.C. label Swedish Columbia, their self-titled thirteen-track masterpiece debut is best navigated on the dance floor, with a strong emphasis on mind expansion and spiritual exploration — evident in the cover art from Sweden-based creator Marc Strömberg.
“Everything Shelby (Cinca) puts out through Swedish Columbia holds a high creative quality. I love the way this cover includes both the space-y front cover, and the punkier Go-Go poster in the insert; it encompasses the wide variety of vibes the band is expressing.” — Marc Strömberg
Reagan Bombs is at once timeless and futuristic, built upon dozens of sounds and influences to create a rarely heard yet thoroughly enjoyable experience. Powered by lead single “Wind Me Up”, the entire album is additionally supported by some incredible contributors — including brilliant percussion from Larry “Stomp Dogg” Atwater and Samuel “Smoke” Dews of the legendary D.C. collective Northeast Groovers — as well as Andrew Black and his pristine bucket drumming.
“I’ve been a fan of Tittsworth’s DJ work from back in the Baltimore club days — probably first hearing him around 2008. Later I found out he was a fan of D.C. Punk music and would actually sneak out to see my old Punk band Frodus in the early/mid ‘90s. My label started becoming active around the same time and I kept in contact with him and followed all of my D.C. peers music over the years. The label picked up a few years ago and Jesse and I started talking about his new project in January last year. I really liked what he was doing with Reagan Bombs as it was very D.C. with its addition of Go-Go drums into Techno. As a fan of Jesse’s music, it felt right that the label stepped in to help get it out there and also do something very D.C. again as we near ten years of being a label — hence kind of going back to the roots as we reflect on the past decade. The project as a whole I find interesting as they don’t seem to just focus on Go-Go but are exploring tablas and other instrumentation along with the whole visual/curation aspect that Scott adds to it. I feel like this first release is scratching the surface as to their potential and have to say I’m super excited to have them a part of the label.” — Shelby Cinca
A day before the release of Reagan Bombs, Sanders and Tittsworth took the time to speak about Go-Go, uncompromising individuality, Washington D.C. and the creative and collaborative process behind one of the year’s best records.
ON CREATIVE PROCESS
JESSE: Initially, Scott and I had an ongoing dialogue of what we felt was acceptable for the project’s scope. When Version 1.0 started to get put to paper, things needed to feel equally respectful to Go-Go without necessarily emulating it. On the counterpoint, respecting the House and Techno ingredients we were sampling from, as well. Just making sure it didn’t seem like a corny crossover record or like we were being disrespectful or trying to exploit the cultures involved.
As a result of the record taking a while to put together, the definitions would evolve a little bit; you can hear a variety of songs on there. Some of them you can tell, “This is clearly their take on a Techno/Go-Go record or a Go-Go/House record.” Then there’s other ones that start to loosen the scope a bit and are exploring and having fun with the mechanics and ingredients of Go-Go in other contexts without necessarily having to follow a format or be really rigid on expectations.
A lot of these records started off with me crudely pasting together a rough idea for a sketch; sitting down with drummers and instrumentalists and making sure there’s a real sincere, obvious Go-Go influence in there.
Once the drums were over the rough idea, I found I had to reconstruct the thing a bit in order to match the musicians and what their input was. The whole thing’s very flexible.
I’d bang together a few things on a laptop, I’d go in the studio with Stomp — he does his thing — I rearrange things around him. Then we thought it might be cool to get Shelby to do live bass… The whole thing was very fluid, which pays tribute to the ways a lot of Go-Go bands were: bands would gain and lose members and have different versions of the band.
SCOTT: Mostly the idea is working with guys in Go-Go and then seeing how it can mix without trying to lose the energy of it. We have these discussions and debates all the time. What’s cool about being on Swedish Columbia: it embraces a lo-fi aesthetic. And I like the idea that we’re taking things from old VHS tapes; there’s a lot of things on the Reagan Bombs record from old VHS tapes.
ON “WIND ME UP”
SCOTT: “Wind Me Up” comes from the 1987 live Go-Go concert at the Cap Centre which was considered the main concert that ever happened, where it was only Go-Go bands and it filled a stadium with only Go-Go bands. When the crowd of like 25,000 people were screaming, “Wind me up!” before Rare Essence starts — who were like, the biggest band at the time — we just thought that would be a really good way to start this.
ON ALBUM
SCOTT: A lot of it is just weird stories that we don’t even feel like we need to explain. Every song has that feel to it; we’re thinking about some anecdote or… There’s this weird history of stuff and every song, we want to have some connection to some moment. And we don’t have to pound people on the head to what that moment is, because we know what it is. And hopefully the emotions come through.
We’re trying to balance a lot of things, too. At the end of the day, I don’t think we’re a Go-Go group. We’re just dudes who really listen to a lot of it. The good outcome of something like that is the way Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones listened to a ton of Blues, and it was sort of their take on it — but it wasn’t Blues. It becomes this hybrid of something else.
There’s some stuff I don’t like about Go-Go — but I’m just focused on the parts I love.
The crazy, lo-fi tapes and the textures. The fact that people would hold a boombox over their head and that would be their music. They would go to a live show, hold a boombox over their head for two hours, flip the tape over and that’s what they’d listen to when they went home. And then, a lot of what people liked was how their tapes sounded. So then Go-Go bands had to start playing the way it sounded on the tapes.
We used a lot of that aesthetic on Reagan Bombs. Like it just feels a little bit out of control all of the time.
JESSE: A lot of the creative concerns were front-loaded. When we started to put these pieces together, there were certain things — as with any new partnership or relationship — figuring out what the mutual goals and workflow is. Being that Scott and I initially were raised by different periods of Go-Go was something we needed to flush out, and then we needed to become more familiar with what the genre is.
We spent a lot of time talking about, “These are the nostalgic moments that we like about certain periods of Go-Go. This is what we think should translate.” And then in this other column of stuff: “What we really like, we recognize is nostalgic and non-translatable and needs to be shelved.”
Once we started whittling away at it, we just got to the place where we trusted each other. Every now and then, one of us might nudge the other person if there was a little, tiny aspect of something that had to be tweaked a little bit. But the whole thing snapped together pretty easily, and part of it is because everybody has different skill-sets.
Scott’s very much got his head in the Netflix / Amazon world and has a couple good movies under his belt; I’m one-hundred percent focused on the sonic aspect. Shelby has a really good idea for aesthetic, placement and visual branding. We’re all united by the love for D.C. music and have grown up on a very specific, influential time of D.C. music.
Especially in the construction of this album, Scott and I spent countless hours really weighing the pro’s and con’s of what a project like this really means. Because on some level, we really love this culture; on another level, essentially if you want to look at it on another level it’s gentrifying Go-Go. And we’ve both been a part of scenes where we’ve seen culture make other people very, very rich and chew it up and spit it out. It’s kind of the way of the world right now.
We spent a lot of time thinking — maybe overthinking — us as gatekeepers. If you’re lucky, you come to the point you realize all that stuff is completely out of your control anyway. You just do the best you can to pay respect to the ingredients. It’s just trying to accomplish balancing something that we’re musically/visually proud of; being able to pay our bills to a certain extent; not completely hoeing out Go-Go or making it seem like it’s anything malicious. But then also not getting caught up on the ‘keeping it real’ factor and trying to keep Go-Go in an academic bubble or historic, nostalgic bubble or even regional bubble. It’s a fine line. We’re just trying to nudge it in the right direction.
Something that was important to us was if you were to play the record for somebody who had no reference point or even cared about the genre, musically it would stand on it’s own.
ON COLLABORATORS
JESSE: It took us a couple years to really put the pieces together. When we first started to thumb around with this idea, Moombahton was really super-popular and just looking at it’s relationship with Pop music. So our first gut reaction was to try to snip some Go-Go breaks and do a Moombahton version of it. And it just wasn’t quite getting to where we needed it to be. So we basically had to deconstruct the genre and really figure out what it is that makes Go-Go work; what sort of pockets, what types of frequencies, what the grooves look like and how we can respectfully combine that with other things we like.
Stomp and Smoke were able to take a deep breath with us and give us the parts we’d need and eventually Frankenstein this thing that we envisioned but didn’t initially have the ingredients for.
SCOTT: We got the best dudes. Smoke won the King of Congas. I think he’s the greatest conga player who’s ever played Go-Go, which is saying a lot because they’re all legendary. The stuff Smoke does is stunning to me.
Our bucket player Andrew Black — real cool dude from D.C. — was out there in L.A. with us for a little practice, which we never got to do the whole band-thing all together because it’s hard to time all that stuff.
Right before he was about to play buckets, he just stopped and goes, “I just want to stop and say that I am in the presence of kings. You are kings!” And Stomp and Smoke were just like, “OK, man. OK.” Like they didn’t know how to process it: this White dude’s telling them he’s in the presence of kings.
“I’m so happy to be a part of this project. I’ve know Jesse since we were teenagers — my man. Scott is so solid and like a living archive of some really vital cultures. Shelby rips and always has. This project directly connected me rhythmically to Go-Go legends like Stomp and Smoke. It has actualized some of my wildest dreams as a White kid growing up D.C./MD into reality and for that I am grateful.” — Andrew Black
ON SINGULARITY OF RECORD
SCOTT: I think we mix it a little bit with what’s going on in the world, but it’s so centered in how we grew up with this stuff; this music. Especially for me: I’m a little bit older than Jesse — we didn’t even listen to Rap back then. We just listened straight to Go-Go records. All our heroes were local dudes playing this music that would just get more and more raw. There was a time when Go-Go was a little bit more Pop and people tried to make it Pop — the audience completely rejected it and it got in this weird, funky dark place that was amazing. It’s just really what we were into.
In fact, we even talk about going deeper into sound. But we also have all these other influences these guys of that time didn’t have; we listen to Techno and House and these other things. So these things affect us.
But it’s just wanting Go-Go to be prominently first and foremost, and then us listening to other music then has an affect on it, as well.
We always debated: “Does this sound Go-Go enough? What would these Go-Go guys do?” And there’s also all these reference points to all these crazy things: like, people in Go-Go’s would get into fights on stage… and still keep playing music. There was this one tape called the Funk & Benny Fight Tape where they’re literally fighting on stage but they won’t stop playing. They’re talking about shooting each other and all kinds of stuff, but they’re still playing; we used part of that in “Boat”: after the trip, he goes “Let’s pick this stuff back up! Where you at?” Well, that’s after he just threatened to kill somebody while they were playing and they finally stopped… “Let’s pick it back up!” back into it.
ON “BOAT”
SCOTT: That was based on all the old Go-Go ‘love boat’ songs. Back in the ‘80’s, they would make these songs called ‘love boat’ songs — which was basically a combination of marijuana and PCP. And a lot of people were doing that in the ‘80’s, so they would have all these songs like, “Don’t take another toke on that love boat” or just scream out, “What ya’ll smoking? Love boat!” It was just a huge thing in the Go-Go world.
So we thought it would be an interesting topic to make a song about.
Usually during the course of that time, the songs were more like, “Hey, have fun with PCP and marijuana!” Where ours was just sort of a bad trip — which can occur if you partake in PCP and marijuana.
ON INSULAR GO-GO SCENE
SCOTT: The craziest thing about it is it’s so atypical of how Black people really consume music in America in lots of ways, because in general Black people create things, enjoy them and then discard them. You’ll have an amazing city like Cincinnati or Ohio that has the greatest Funk artists who ever lived — Slave, Ohio Players, all these people — but they don’t have legacy careers. Whereas with Go-Go: the same bands have been playing for 40 years! With young people still going to see the bands! Rare Essence’s first song is like, 1976 — and they still play five local shows a week! The Junkyard Band’s the same way.
They just adjust with the times a little bit, and they just keep going on and on and on.
I think a lot of White audiences who listen to that music say, “Wait, hold on a second. I’m going to stick here for a while.” Let’s say you went to see a Wu-Tang Clan concert: it’d probably be mostly White people; a lot of backpackers. With Go-Go, it’s kind of not that way. It has this different rhythm to it — which is just this one city’s deep connection to this thing. And it doesn’t care what the outside world thinks, so it just hangs around.
ON IMPACT OF D.C. & GO-GO
SCOTT: It absolutely had a major effect on me and my other career as a filmmaker. I just didn’t care; this is what I like.
Go-Go has a lot to do with that. The craziest thing that happened with Go-Go is that there was a Go-Go movie made by the same people who made Harder They Come. It was made in 1986: it was called Good To Go. It was a horrible movie, and it just tried to make Go-Go really Pop. The main band in that movie was Trouble Funk, and they made amazing records. Trouble Funk’s early output has been sampled over a hundred times — the Beastie Boys, Brand Nubian… “Drop The Bomb” has been sampled like 119 times. But when they made that movie, the Go-Go audience rejected them forever; literally forever.
Trouble Funk was rejected in terms of not being able to do those five, six shows a week. And the sounds just got more raw and deeper to then never really be accepted by the outside world ever again. It just became: “This is a completely local sound, and we’re not trying to sound like anything or be bigger or anything else.” From that moment on, that was it. That’s such a weird thing to think about: how that evolved that way.
JESSE: There’s just something in the water from the mid-to-late ’80’s through the late ’90’s, whether you’re talking about the Disco era, Indie rock scene or early East Coast Rave scene or Go-Go scene. There just became these communities that had a different moral value. These scenes were not necessarily infatuated with making big, hit records. There was a lot of selflessness in the music; there was a sense of community.
Go-Go had an attempted break-out moment where there was a couple hit records and Rick Rubin signed one of the bigger bands; it looked like it was going to have a go for it.
And it all came crashing down.
The movie that was supposed to propel it was a complete failure; the follow-up records that were the bands trying to emulate the actual hit records weren’t genuine and missed the mark.
As a result, these folks recessed back into their own community and this music would provide for itself for almost forty years. It became it’s own culture and community and took care of all facets of life when the city and the infrastructure around it no longer could.
Flash forward a little past that: if you were to look at it now, it’s at a really interesting point. You look at the top ten bands who got to the point where they got shoved outside D.C. because they were associated with violence and they had to find their own little pocket in the surrounding areas are now welcome back into it because Go-Go in itself has aged. Now those folks don’t mind paying $25-$30 a ticket to go into a theater and seeing their favorite Go-Go band play songs from yesteryear. But it’s also heartwarming that you can still go see local Go-Go bands in PJ County three nights a week. In that regard, it is it’s own thing.
SCOTT: It just feels like this amazing, culturally rich thing. And the city’s kind of starting to embrace it. You lose those kinds of things as we go on in a global world. You start to lose that taste and that thing that doesn’t seem like there’s some hand that is trying to guide it because of money. Go-Go’s definitely not guided because of money. And that’s a genre that literally fought that off with everything it had, and it just landed in this weird place. The people in D.C. have this ownership of it.
It’s so cool. Every time I go to a Go-Go, I’m amazed at how much I like it. In essence, having grown up with it and I’m listening to this stuff… every time I go it’s like, “Wow… shit is hard!” It’s difficult for stuff to sound hard to you for fifty years. It doesn’t sound corny — it just sounds raw.
As much as we can stay connected to that thing — and also bring in our own experiences and things that we love — then I think we have something interesting for a while. And it’s fun to do.
ON DYNAMICS
SCOTT: Sometimes things just get bigger because people like it. And there’s a really interesting push-pull with Jesse and me on it. Because Jesse is really about having it sonically be this — and it’s good. But I’ll be like, “Let’s take it off a tape!” And he’ll say, “Well, that tape sounds busted…” That’ll literally be our tension.
I think that tension really adds to the record on some level, because it’s a mix of both where it can have this sonic depth to it, but then have this rawness to it. We’re always trying to process how you can do both.
We’re always going back to the initial source: real crazy, weird stuff. There’s all these celebrities in Go-Go simply because their name is on a critical record. They were shouted out by Chuck Brown or something on a critical recording. There’s this woman named Lisa Of The World: she’s famous because someone said, “Oh, there’s Lisa Of The World in the audience.”
You’re almost entering this whole planet that is untouched. There’s very few Black movements that are as untouched as Go-Go.
It’s been mined a couple of times, but mostly it went untouched because it got so raw and African at a certain point. So raw, the tapes were so lo-fi and I’ve always said this: there are moments of Go-Go that are the Blackest music ever made on the planet.
It’s like if James Brown went to Africa and just stayed there. It’s Blacker than Africa and Blacker than James Brown at the same time, too. It takes the Blackest parts of both of them and smushes them together.
I’m like, “Damn! This is Black.” Whatever that means — that’s what it is. It’s too Black for almost everybody — except for people in D.C. who listen to it.
ON “CHUCKIN”
JESSE: That had two points of origin. Point #1 was we were doing a practice show and we had three drummers multitracked, and really they were just messing around and I just caught one good loop that they happened to multitrack the groove of it. It was somewhere halfway between a House song and Go-Go song and Afrobeat song. It’s one of the few records that makes the early, Latin influence in Go-Go more obvious.
Once I got a really good groove from it, the next component that helped guide the track was the vocal of a Chuck Brown interview, who’s considered to be the Godfather of the genre and invented it. The interview goes on and he’s just talking about this rhythm that would define the Nation’s capital — this pulse of the city — this very unique, syncopated beat essentially came to him as a child as he was just pounding on the side of a rail track as the trains would go by.
He’s talking about how he created this genre in an effortless fashion and his early relationship with music; you even get little snippets of what you might even interpret as gentrification in there. From a vocal standpoint, it’s just very powerful and it lined up with the drums pretty well. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could segue the vocal emulation of the beat over the actual beat; it turned out pretty well. From there, I was just trying to be respectful of the vocal.
ON LACK OF EGO
SCOTT: The whole thing is just so ridiculously humble it’s almost unsettling. There’s so much love between the audience and the artists, they’re fine with where it is. It’s weird, because Go-Go also has this weird economic thing, where who knows where we would land if we kept doing it or kept collaborating with different kinds of people. Because we’re very open to the world.
But for them, I don’t even know if it makes sense for Go-Go to go international. Because they still have careers; this is supplemental income. They have jobs. Those $5,000-to-$10,000-a-pop gigs four or five times a week start to add up. So you have people where it’s a significant supplement to their income. And who has that? What other group of musicians?
And to break it down: you have consumers who know individual instrumentalists. Just regular people with regular jobs — not music nerds or whatever. Just people who are consuming it. They know individual instrumentalists. And I don’t know where that happens in Black music anywhere. People know vocalists, but they’re not like, “This is the drummer of the What? Band.” They know who’s playing. It’s just this weird, fanatical thing.
Nothing compares to it live. It’s still the greatest live experience for me. When you’re hearing it live, you’re like, “Oh, this is the best music ever made.” But it doesn’t sound that way on wax.
JESSE: This thing was birthed from me and Scott’s mutual love for Go-Go music and growing up in a very sort modest, different time in Washington, D.C. and live very non-Hollywood, L.A. lifestyles. Another important component of that is just sitting in a dark room and learning the technical aspects of this until I almost hate myself, so maybe that’s why there’s a lack of ego!
ON POTENTIAL OTHER PROJECTS
JESSE: Version 1.0 was: we love House, we love Go-Go — let’s do a respectful combination. Version 2.0 is the idea of embracing this globalized world and embracing doing tastefully Go-Go-inspired versions of things that are just more fluid — more common in Pop culture. Not being afraid of taking a Go-Go drummer to Atlanta and getting a rapper and cranking out something that’s got heavy 808’s but still feels like a D.C. record. Not being afraid of doing a gritty, lo-fi Rock version of it.
Embracing what it means to put out music in 2017 and put out cultural music for a world that vastly really doesn’t care about culture and figuring out where your battles are.
ON “RED THUMB”
Scott: I think Jesse’s done a really good job of processing the project. I just kind of infused, like, “Oh, here’s this woman wishing this dude a birthday wish! Let’s play it backwards and then put Indian tablas on it — that sounds like Go-Go.” That’s how that song came together. Literally, it’s Ms. Laydee wishing Stomp Dogg a happy birthday on some video tape, and then we just rewound it backwards. And it sort of sounds like some language you don’t understand, but she’s still got the rhythm of the speech.
ON PASSION
SCOTT: It’s just how stuff starts to come together. It’s been a really fun process. It’s just one of those weird things: it’s a part of me and influenced me. It’s had a profound affect on me, just because it’s so uncompromising in a way. And if that is in your bloodstream, then it’s hard to get it out — even if you wanted to.
But I’m glad it’s there. I’m glad there’s these people that have this thing, and they don’t give a shit about the outcome other than their own enjoyment of it.
JESSE: I’m almost forty, and the reason why I’ve been able to maintain a similar amount if not more amount of passion than when I started when I was sixteen is because you do have to pay attention to what inspires you, and follow that at any cost.
As a result, at the right time and place it might make sense to open a club. Or it might make sense four years later to not be a part of that and just lock yourself in a room and record drummers of a genre that nobody’s heard of.
There’s peaks and valleys of things. A Wikipedia page of accomplishments usually seems pretty linear, but for what I’m trying to do — which is to have the longest relationship with music as I can — usually following inspiration comes with it’s share of peaks and valleys.
In that regard, whatever I get myself into I throw myself into it — one-hundred percent full-force.
