Words

What’s so funny about peace Love and Soul?

I wanted to go a little bit more on the passing of Don Cornelius, he has always been a surprising inspiration to me. During “What.” he was a big touchstone, not directly in terms of taking style but as inspiration; that you could be smart have soul and still have amazing music.

When i was a kid for my 1st grade year we lived in Chatfield Mn, a really tiny town outside of Rochester. We lived inĀ an 4plex apartment building in the middle of a corn field. The big amusement was hanging out in gulleys and trying to get truckers to blow their horn. We only got one tv channel and sadly it didn’t have cartoons this made Saturday mornings a lot less fun.

But it also was where I discovered Soul Train, every weekend they would run the previous weeks and the new weeks, which worked out to three or so hours of Soul Train followed by an hour of American Bandstand. So there in a cornfield in a half-a-horse town i first saw Bootsy, and P-Funk and all the cartoon characters of soul. along with Mr Cornelius they became the constant cast of characters in my subconscious. I am forever grateful for that, he changed the landscape, for pop music, for american tv, and of my dreams.

To this day he’s still a character in my dreaming, the offside narrator. It sucks that he’s gone, and it sucks the way he went. Wherever he is I hope he found love, peace and soul, and that we all can too. Because the world just got a little less funky.