- Courtesy of Aloha Got Soul
- Aloha Got Soul founder Roger Bong
Because I’ve worked in music media for more than a decade, I’ve seen so many reissue labels it’d make your ass hurt—and few types of music seem to inspire reissues like soul and funk. What I haven’t seen, though, is a reissue label devoted exclusively to soul and funk from Hawaii. In fact I doubt I could’ve done much more than guess if you’d asked me to describe the differences between soul and funk from Hawaii and soul and funk from the mainland.
With his blog and label, Bong hopes “to document a side of Hawaii’s contemporary musical past that hasn’t been documented much at all.” He says he’s had a hard time finding some of the records he’s interested in, and he lives in Hawaii—the task is next to impossible almost anywhere else. “When I first started in 2010,” he says, “the only info available online was in Japanese! I wanted to create a repository of information where others can learn about this music.”
