First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
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"Itâs the first time [the showâs] been hosted by a couple of tomatoes!"
"Labels felt it was too hard to break a woman at radio so they werenât signing them, and radio says the labels arenât giving them the artists. When I signed Miranda [Lambert to Sony in the early 2000s], it was never âUh-oh, sheâs a female.â That only started in the last 10 years. I [recall] taking an artist around, and a record label exec said, âIâm not signing any femalesâ â not even âIâm not signing your female.â I mean, that was spoken."
"If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out. The reason is mainstream country radio generates more quarter hours from female listeners at the rate of 70 to 75 percent, and women like male artists. The expectation is we're principally a male format with a smaller female component. I've got about 40 music databases in front of me, and the percentage of females in the one with the most is 19 percent. Trust me, I play great female records, and we've got some right now; they're just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females."
"This is the biggest bunch of BULLSHIT I have ever heard. I am gonna do everything in my power to support and promote female singer/songwriters in country music. Always."
"Whether or not a song gets airplay should be based on how good the SONG isâŚnot whether itâs sung by a male or female. Itâs kind of like comparing tall artists to short artists, blondes to brunettes, bald guys to guys with hairâŚ.what does it matter?"
"I think it got a lot of attention focused on something that frankly the audience probably knows nothing about, which is the fact that there are gatekeepers at radio and people that consult and decide what gets played,â McBride said. âI donât think people were really aware of that. ⌠I donât know if itâs helped or not helped, but we do have some more females getting some airplay on the radio than there was a year ago."
"Don't worry babe. I see an opportunity here. (A) big ole vagina-shaped opportunity."
"I wrote the song âFight Like a Girlâ about Tomatogate. (Radio consultant) Keith Hill said, men are the lettuce of the country salad, women are the tomatoes. You put a couple on top, but any more than (19) percent is too much. Thatâs literally almost a direct quote. Me and my two really good friends got pissed off and wrote a song, which I think is the best way to handle being pissed off."
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.