Black People Have Always Loved Phil Collins. Just Ask My Dad.
And Culture Club. Lots of Culture Club.
At the end of 2018, my father and stepmother made a cross-country move to Southern California, but they couldn’t take everything with them. So a few days before they hit the road for good, we loaded my Ford Fusion: Milk crates stuffed with vinyl spanning three decades stacked up until I could barely see the back windshield.
Since then, I’ve been getting to know my dad better through his record collection, starting with ’70s funk and ending roughly at the tail end of the new jack swing era, when CDs began to dominate the music-buying market. What I knew about Dad’s musical tastes came from Mom’s retelling, and it was usually in the collective sense:
“We both liked Prince.”
“We both liked Rick James.”
“We both liked DeBarge.”
“Oh, but he loved The System. Every time they put something out, he’d go running.”
I still remember telling a confused girl with fresh new braids in elementary school that she looked not like Brandy, but “Forget Me Nots” singer Patrice Rushen.
