Reports that SiriusXM is set to part ways with Howard Stern, with the broadcasting corporation allegedly being unwilling to keep paying the radio star’s massive salary, will no doubt have people wondering: was Howard Stern really still on the air?
The radio veteran might not have been cancelled, in the literal or metaphorical sense, but there is some extent to which he has cancelled himself. The US Sun alleges that SiriusXM’s attitude towards Stern has something to do with “the political climate”, and is true that many fans have been alienated by Stern’s COVID hawkishness and anti-Trump tirades, but The Howard Stern Show has not declined in relevancy because of Stern’s politics. It has declined because he has stopped trying to entertain his audience.
Stern began broadcasting from his palatial home, and not his New York studios, because of his fear of COVID — a potentially rational concern that spiralled into something was at best paranoid and at worst an excuse to indulge agoraphobia. The pandemic ended but Stern barely returned from the home studio that he calls his “bunker”.
Once, millions of fans of the outrageous “shock jock” had no idea what he was going to say next. Now, his themes were all too predictable. He was tired. He was in therapy. He was learning the guitar. Listening to Stern felt a lot less like being part of a cultural phenomenon and a lot more like listening to an old uncle who had given up on life. The political rants might have been controversial but at least Stern sounded somewhat engaged. Usually, he sounded like he was thoroughly depressed.
It has been a poignant decline for the man who once described himself as the “King of all Media”. In the nineties, and the early noughties, Stern was an unignorable loudmouth — a cultural insurgent who amused and appalled a vast audience across the United States.
There’s no getting around it: Stern was a terrible person. Pop culture in the nineties put a premium on nastiness — with Jerry Springer, and nu-metal, and professional wrestling’s blood-soaked “Attitude Era” — and Stern was the nastiest of all. He mocked the dead. He brought struggling people onto his show to insult them. He viciously tormented his radio rivals. One of his most compelling episodes was his live response to 9/11 as the attacks unfolded. It says a lot about Stern’s essential callousness, though, that one of his responses was to insist that the USA “nuke them” and “fry their children”.
Stern later admitted to being ashamed of a lot of his earlier statements. A cynic might suggest that his ponderous obsession with mental health, and sycophantic interviews with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, represented an attempt to avoid cancellation. But perhaps this is untrue. Perhaps he really has become more of a liberal in his old age — and perhaps he really does feel embarrassed about his inflammatory and exploitative earlier work.
The problem is that Stern didn’t just stop being a provocateur. He stopped being entertaining. Say what you like about Howard Stern as a man, but he had always been committed to entertaining his listeners. From conducting outrageous interviews, to fuelling on-air fights, to giving a platform to great comedians like Norm Macdonald, and Gilbert Gottfried, and Artie Lange, he made millions of people laugh. In his old age, he didn’t just stop offending people. He stopped amusing them.
It should have been possible to cut out the blackface and the lecherousness and still, you know, be funny. Not for Stern. He became, I wrote previously:
… a striking representative of elite baby boomers, whose iconoclastic and cynical attitudes have been mutating into moralism and hysteria as the thunk thunk thunk of the bottom of a scythe approaches. They spent decades mocking the dinosaurs who came before them — but now they are the dinosaurs.
Like a lot of people in the age of wokeness, he appeared to confuse being moral with being desperately earnest
Stern’s pretensions towards gravitas, with his ponderous celebrity interviews and his slobbering treatment of Democrat politicians, never reached the levels of profound. The Howard Stern Show had contained more powerful moments in its more anarchic and spontaneous days, like Artie Lange admitting to his heroin use or producer Gary Dell’Abate breaking down as he remembered his brother’s dying days. Now, Stern took himself far too seriously to be serious. Like a lot of people in the age of wokeness, he appeared to confuse being moral with being desperately earnest. “By calling him humourless,” Martin Amis wrote of someone else in Experience, “I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.” So it was.
The Howard Stern Show might continue in a literal sense. Spiritually, on the other hand, it died years ago.
