Christel Boncan

My family and I moved houses a lot when I was younger, but for as long as I can remember, each house ALWAYS, ALWAYS had a music room. You couldn’t pull my dad away from tinkering with his newly purchased subwoofers,  hooking them up here and there, making sure we had carpeted the floors and padded the walls, trying to achieve surround sound-ness.  I remember, he would stack his CDs up in this tall ass tower and every night, he’d call me and make me listen to whichever was on heavy rotation for the week.

He made me listen to (in no particular order) Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, The Carpenters, Earth, Wind & Fire, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight, Louis Armstrong, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and the list goes on and on (with matching, “Iha, this is Burt Bacharach”), but it was Motown that stuck to me ever since.

My dad said I used to call it “black people music” and damn right, black people are hella talented (no racism here) but whatever it is, I just have one darn good reason why I love it:

There’s just SO MUCH SOUL.

P.S. Looking back, maybe that’s why in an ‘07 interview I had back then, I said I had this strange fascination with African-Americans. That explains a lot of things. Haha!