Why don't classic-rock radio stations, which have no problem playing funk and disco songs by QUEEN and the ROLLING STONES, ever play FUNKADELIC or JAMES BROWN or TINA TURNER or PRINCE? Why does the current rotation at my local "new alternative" station include white artists who do hip-hop but not Black artists who do hip-hop (or, based on a quick glance at the top 50 or 60 tracks, Black artists who aren't KENNYHOOPLA, who, by the way, this is some good modern-rock throwbacking)? I've been asking these questions for years, sometimes in print, sometimes in a road-rage-like state inside my car and sometimes in the direction of actual radio programmers, who tend to use phrases like "the culture of the station" and sentences like "they're legacy artists who our listeners grew up with," which is sort of the rock radio equivalent of kids getting into YALE most because one of their parents went to Yale, which is how bad ideas perpetuate through bad systems for year after year and decade after decade while I continue to scream into my windshield. Summer 2020 seems a particularly good time to change some of the answers to the same questions, and then to change some of that programming. In ROLLING STONE, KATHERINE TURMAN, who has a long classic-rock resume of her own, asks what the industry can do to participate in the current national conversation about race, from dropping problematic songs like this Rolling Stones staple to having on-air dialog about the issues. (She gives credit to CUMULUS MEDIA for a coordinated effort to read the names of Black victims of police brutality on stations across all its formats). Me, I'd love to hear P-FUNK or, say, the GAP BAND's "YOU DROPPED A BOMB ON ME" somewhere in between RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS and CARS twofers. Any decent human programmer, and probably even a decent non-human one, could make this work without breaking a sweat if given the chance. And I'd love to hear my local new alternative station drop this in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon block. (The objections on that end inevitably include the fact that DUA SALEH's label probably isn't servicing their tracks to alternative stations, to which I would ask: So what? You have machines capable of downloading and playing music and you have ASCAP and BMI licenses. You can just grab it and play it.) I'm not asking for new quotas. I'm asking to end the unspoken old ones that keep things, perpetually, exactly as they are. In response to CHERIE HU asking "what would be the music-industry equivalent of all these white actors stepping down from their roles as Black characters," I offer some other off-the-cuff random ideas. Lots of discussion-worthy ideas from other people, too, including what's becoming a consensus suggestion for substantive change: "reverting majority catalog ownership to their rightful creators"... Music supervisors want more credit, too. Their chief nemesis: The DIRECTORS GUILD OF AMERICA. Some fascinating inside baseball here... RIP HACHALU HUNDESSA, WILLIE WRIGHT and JORDAN "STEPA J." GROGGS.