Art & Creativity Quote by Bernie Worrell

There is a quiet insult baked into Worrell's shrug: radio isn’t just bad, it’s disqualified. Coming from a musician who helped invent the rubbery, future-leaning language of Parliament-Funkadelic, the line reads less like cranky nostalgia and more like a boundary being drawn around what counts as music-making versus what counts as product.

The intent is personal but the subtext is structural. “I don’t listen” isn’t a claim about taste; it’s a refusal to participate in a system where playlists are engineered for maximum retention, compression flattens dynamics, and songs arrive pre-chewed into hooky, three-minute units designed to behave well around ads. For a player steeped in improvisation, extended grooves, and the messy pleasure of musicians responding to each other in real time, “radio today” implies an environment hostile to risk. It’s not that melody or rhythm vanished; it’s that the conditions under which they’re made have shifted from expression to optimization.

The phrase “not really music to me” is doing extra work. He doesn’t say “it’s bad music” or “it’s not my thing.” He questions the category itself, which is bolder: it suggests that when gatekeeping gets outsourced to corporate programming and metrics, what survives may still be sound, even craft, but not the social, spiritual, and bodily function he associates with music.

Context matters: Worrell’s era treated radio as a conduit for experimentation as much as commerce. His disappointment lands as cultural diagnosis: when the medium narrows, the imagination does too.