War & Peace Quote by Bernie Worrell

There’s a tired clarity in Bernie Worrell’s phrasing, like someone describing a rigged game without bothering to sound shocked anymore. “The radios are going to dictate” lands as both prophecy and complaint: an acknowledgment that gatekeepers, not audiences, decide what gets heard. Worrell isn’t talking about taste in the abstract. He’s naming an industry machine that standardizes sound, narrows risk, and rewards repetition because repetition sells.

The sentence structure does a lot of work. The clipped certainty of “are going to” makes it feel inevitable, while the pivot to “That’s another fight” suggests he’s already been in plenty of battles - creative, commercial, racial, all of it - and knows how quickly the argument stops being about music. Radio “dictating” isn’t just a programming choice; it’s power. For an artist whose legacy is built on funk’s maximalism and weird brilliance, radio’s demand for neat formats is a kind of aesthetic policing.

“Another story there” is the most revealing line: a wink toward the behind-the-scenes politics (labels, promoters, payola-adjacent incentives, market research posing as destiny) that fans rarely see. He doesn’t spill the tea; he implies the cup is overflowing.

Then comes the soft, almost heartbreaking ask: “I wish they just let it be.” Not “let us win,” not “play my records,” but let the music exist without being forced into commercial obedience. It’s resignation, yes, but also a quiet defense of creative autonomy - the belief that culture should be discovered, not dictated.