Atoka Chase – My Father
Boat Burning – RM1
Caz and the Day Laborers – Now That I’m Dancing
Mud Rey – Tutelo
Aztec Sun – Redline (Commuter Funk)
Zoe Ravenwood – Time Again
Kokayi – SEASIDE:Monterey County
Ben Williams – Moonlight In Vermont
Matt Chaconas – Cosby (Un Mensonge)
Unring the Bell – Mission to Hell, People
Bill Emerson & Sweet Dixie – Yard Sale
aerialist – nebulon
Flash Frequency – Escape Theory
Wes Swing – In a Station of the Metro
Gods’Illa – Feel (Feat. DuaneFace)
Tom Espinola – Milano Nights
Dan Harris – Cowboy Song
Maelstrom Fiddlers – Itzikel
Asheru – Trapped (feat. O.U.O.)
QuinTango – To Ostatnia Niedziela

Wes Swing – Instrumental 1
Extra Golden – Ilando Gima Onge
Asheru – Boogie (feat. J-Live & Oddisee)
Will Spelker – He Was Mensa
David King – Razor Sharp + Interludes (Bend Language, Sketches 1 & 2)
FeelFree – Fishery
So Spirited – FakeFangs
Terrill Mast – Gifts (feat. Ryan Selove, Jed Lingat, Radhika Bhatt, Morrison Mast)
Dove Lady – Waiting For A Delivery
Sriram Gopal – Bapuji
Middle Distance Runner – Sweettalker
Timmy Sells His Soul – Platinum Card
The Red Fetish – The Rain That Feeds the Meadows
Power Pirate – Alone
aerialist – computia
Projekt Eins – Denouement
The Cowards Choir – Name the Fear
Ken & Brad Kolodner – John Brown’s March
CrushnPain – Night Terrors
Borracho – Empty

It’s a step forward for the center, which appears to be fully embracing hip-hop after dipping its toe into the culture with the wide-ranging One Mic festival and orchestral performances featuring Nas and Kendrick Lamar.

The inaugural hip-hop program will focus on the culture’s history and activism side, spearheaded by producer and emcee Q-Tip, formerly of A Tribe Called Quest. Beyond that, well, the possibilities are titillating — which is why Bandwidth decided to ask a few experts what they’d like to see.

Here’s what they told us.

1. Get weird

DJ Heat has two words: Young Thug. “I’m not a fan, but it would be interesting — especially if they do an orchestra type of thing,” the DJ says. After all, she says, the trio Migos had its “trap symphony.” So why not Young Thug, the envelope-pushing Atlanta rapper whose lyrics come across as either gibberish or post-verbal brilliance, depending on who you ask?

“I’d like to see just out-the-box type stuff. Because yeah, we kind of expected Kendrick [to perform with an orchestra]. We can see Nas,” she says. “But Young Thug and the NSO? It’s like, come on.”

2. Keep it positive 

Javier Starks, the lyricist from D.C. whose projects often draw from hip-hop’s history, says if he was appointed the Kennedy Center’s hip-hop director, he’d take an ideological approach, in part by showing films that “aid in bridging the constantly expanding gap between hip-hop’s origins and its current role in mainstream media.”

“I’d book and showcase positive hip-hop acts who remind the world just how beautiful and moving hip-hop can be when it isn’t riddled with needless profanity, misogyny, excessive negativity and violence,” Starks says.

He adds: “All of my music is curse-free and positive, so I may be biased … but from my experiences, hip-hop in a raw, uplifting form is something the entire world can relate to.”

3. Think about ‘latitude’

It’s worth noting that the Kennedy Center “opened to the public in the fall of 1971, just as the first rumblings of what we now call hip-hop culture were hitting the street of the Bronx,” says George Washington University ethnomusicologist Kip Lornell.

Lornell says Q-Tip’s selection to head the program “perhaps says more about the institution than the man,” and he hopes the artist is “given the latitude and the support that hip-hop, which is now really mainstream American culture, deserves.”

What might that latitude entail? Lornell suggests emphasizing talent from the DMV as well as the Caribbean roots of hip-hop. He’s also interested to see what effects Q-Tip’s efforts might have on the demographics of the institution’s audience: “Will more folks of color attend programs at the Kennedy Center than in the past? What about white folks attending ‘black’ programs? Diversity (however defined) always presents a challenge and we’ll see what the Center and Q-Tip can accomplish in this realm.”

4. More live bands

Washington’s hip-hop artists know better than anyone that D.C. loves a live band — and they’d take instruments over two turntables and a microphone any day. But rapper RAtheMC doesn’t see that as a challenge. She wants the Kennedy Center to capitalize on it. “I’m big on musicianship in hip-hop,” the emcee writes in an email. “It’s always awesome to hear rap over live instrumentation.”

What would she most like to see happen at the Ken Cen? “The Roots, N.E.R.D and Kendrick Lamar along with their backing bands,” she writes. “I wouldn’t mind opening for a bill like that, either, along with my band.”

5. Get Q-Tip out of the office

“I really don’t have any guidance to offer Q-Tip, because he is one of my hip-hop Jedi masters,” says Asheru, a longtime hip-hop artist and educator from D.C. But he still has a wishlist.

Asheru wants the Kennedy Center to sponsor more hip-hop educational opportunities across D.C. and nationwide. He thinks the venue should also offer free hip-hop workshops, book hip-hop artists in residence, organize weekly hip-hop concerts at the center’s Millennium Stage. Oh, and one last thing: have “Q-Tip deejaying throughout those hallowed halls on any given day.”

Local legends Rare Essence are scheduled to perform at the festival Tuesday, sharing a bill with other D.C.-area artists including Prinze George, Oddisee, Paperhaus, Black Alley, Kokayi and Asheru. The showcase is technically part of the Washington, DC Economic Partnership’s technology campaign during the festival, but Rare Essence is paying for the trip itself with a combination of private donations and money it raised at a recent fundraiser concert.

Bandleader Andre “Whiteboy” Johnson, the group’s only remaining original member, says Rare Essence has been looking to play SXSW for several years to meet with industry representatives and get its sound in front of new audiences.

“We’re trying to expand Rare Essence and go-go music beyond the beltway,” Johnson says.

Now nearly 40 years old, Rare Essence could seem like a strange fit for SXSW. It’s not a buzz band with a recent Soundcloud hit or a nationally known group hitting the summer festival circuit. It’s a treasured local band that’s been performing in clubs and gymnasiums across D.C., Maryland and Virginia for decades.

Rare Essence’s fans still call it the “wickedest band alive.” They’ve seen the group through peaks — like the success of singles “Body Moves,” “Lock It” and “Work the Walls” — and tragedy, namely the deaths of trumpeter Anthony “Lil Benny” Harley and drummer Quentin “Footz” Davidson.

But like most go-go bands, Rare Essence hasn’t built a strong national following. It hasn’t had a hit outside the D.C. region for years.

Johnson says his band wants to play SXSW, in part, to change that. He says the best way to market a band like his is to perform live. That’s how go-go music must be heard.

“People like live music, and that’s the main ingredient to go-go,” Johnson says.

There’s a good chance Tuesday’s District music showcase in Austin will attract an audience that’s more D.C.-aware than the rest of the SXSW crowd, but still, Johnson says it could be a challenging performance. Rare Essence shows attract familiar faces. Band members used to do shout-outs by reading the name and neighborhood of fans from a card. Now, Johnson says, the band knows most of the shout-outs by heart. They can’t expect that level of local love in Austin.

During SXSW, Rare Essence will probably play the same songs it performs in D.C., Johnson says, but the shorter set time means the group probably won’t break into extended jam sessions like it regularly does at home — unless the audience demands it.

“We’ve been in situations where people would walk in and not know what this is and stand around for the first couple of songs,” Johnson says, “but by the end of the set, they’re into it like everyone else.”

SXSW isn’t Rare Essence’s only attempt to define itself for new audiences: The band’s trip to Texas coincides with the release of its first batch of new songs in more than a decade. Johnson says the new release contains some of the band’s best music ever. Perhaps a few business meetings and a good performance will yield more concert dates outside the D.C. region and new ears for its fresh material.

Though scholars and music journalists have already declared go-go a strictly local phenomenon, Johnson suggests maybe they’re wrong. Maybe go-go just hasn’t broken out of D.C. yet.

“The reason for us even going to South By Southwest is for us to expand Rare Essence and go-go as much as we can try to get to that next level,” Johnson says.

“I remember talking about putting this album together, and people being like, ‘Why do you want to talk about that? That’s not really gonna make noise,'” says the 39-year-old Brookland resident.

Asheru—real name Gabriel Benn—says he closed his ears to that skepticism. He’s reached a point in his long artistic career where he wants to call his own shots. “I’m just loving the freedom that I have to be able to make the music that I want to make,” he says, “and make statements that I want to make.”

The new video for his song “No Matter Where You Go” is just one part of the larger, globally minded statement on Sleepless in Soweto. Asheru, who works as a hip-hop ambassador with the State Department’s Next Level program, filmed it with director Federico Peixoto while on tour in Costa Rica last August. Between lecturing at Universidad de Costa Rica, the MC found time to shoot at landmarks such as Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line building in Limón. The point was to emphasize the strong presence of African culture in the country.

“It just opened my eyes to realizing that there’s a whole community of descendants of enslaved Africans” in Costa Rica, Asheru says. “It all came together in realizing that no matter where you go … there you are.”

For the artist—who has an anthropology degree from the University of Virginia—his Sleepless in Soweto album and videos represent a combination of artistry and academia. He shot another Sleepless video in South Africa, and he has one coming from his recent trip to Bangladesh. “It’s all been one big anthropological experience for me with this album,” Asheru says.

Wayna, a local Grammy-nominated singer born in Ethiopia, delivers the silky chorus. The vocalist appears in the video, too, though she didn’t fly down to Costa Rica for the occasion. Asheru and Peixoto just made it look that way—and he declines to say where her scenes were shot. (If you can guess the location, leave a comment, please.)

The video for “No Matter Where You Are” arrived Tuesday, the day after a grand jury decided not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson in the slaying of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. That timing, of course, was not planned. But it seems appropriate, Asheru says, because he wrote the song right around the time another unarmed black youth, Trayvon Martin, was killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Florida. “That’s why there’s a line in the song saying, ‘Inside of every Trayvon, an Obama.'”

In addition to his next music video, Asheru has another project called Small World in the works. He’s not sure whether that will be an EP, an LP or something else—and he’s intentionally keeping it loose.

After putting years of work into hip-hop, he says, “I feel like now I kind of deserve the right to put music out in whatever format I feel like, instead of trying to model it or time it or put it up against other things that are going on,” he says. “I just want it to be my own bubble.”

Now Asheru has a new music video for a song that touts his local pride. Over an Afrobeat instrumental, “Funky D.C.”—a track from his recent South Africa-influenced album Sleepless In Soweto—finds the veteran rapper shouting out neighborhoods and locations in his hometown: “Trinidad, Uptown, Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, Southwest Waterfront, Benning Road, Minnesota, Sheriff Road…”

Shot at the D.C. Funk Parade in May, the video has Asheru performing with the Ballou Senior High School Marching Band along U Street NW. Asheru says he wanted the video to focus on the students and the work they put in. “I wanted to make sure we got all the best sides of the city in one visual,” says the rapper, who’s served as Ballou’s director of arts integration for the past three years. But he aimed to demonstrate his own multitudes, too. “I also wanted this to show the many sides of Asheru.”

In May, Ash released a video for “So Amazing” that was shot during a visit to South Africa this spring. After “Funky D.C.,” he plans to drop a new video every month until a remix project for Sleepless in Soweto releases this fall.