Howard Stern and Boomer Decline

Howard Stern is traipsing back to his Manhattan studio after two years of staying at, and broadcasting from, his enormous Hamptons home. Stern has been too afraid of COVID-19 to budge from his palatial residence since the beginning of the pandemic.

What happened to Howard Stern? His fans have asked it time and again in recent decades — but I think the answer has a relevance that transcends the man and his show. It tells us something about the culture that we live in.

Stern — dominating radio and haunting TV and publishing — was the most untameable man in media. He said what he liked, when he liked, about who he liked, and all attempts to have him silenced failed. He had fought his way to success and he seethed with rage and defiance.

It helped, of course, that making people angry drew in listeners. The term “shock jock” might have been reductive but Stern attracted an audience of people who wondered what the hell the radio host might blurt out next. “Political correctness” had become a modish term in the 90s as controversies erupted around race and sex. People of a more libertarian bent had also tired of the anti-drug and anti-sex moralism of the Christian right. Stern was a foul-mouthed antidote. 

He was far from alone. As both legal and formal restrictions on what could be said and done were deconstructed, there was a kind of orgiastic nastiness in popular culture. Not all of it, of course. On one side, there was the gleaming gloop of Friends, the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys. On the other, though, was the violence, sex and swearing of the World Wrestling Federation, nu-metal, South Park and Howard Stern.

When it came to nineties nastiness, Stern was in a class of his own. It is extraordinary to look back on the shit he’d say. When the Latin American singer Selena was murdered, Stern embraced the opportunity to ridicule her music, saying “Alvin and the Chipmunks have more soul” and putting on a comedy Mexican accent to sneer, “Let’s dance and forget that every human being in our country is corrupt.” Stern’s mind always leapt downwards to the most unpleasant thing to say about an event. He joked, in the aftermath of the Columbine Massacre, that the shooters should have raped the “good looking girls”.

I suppose anyone who talks on air for hours almost every day for decades will say some awful things. Have you never told a morbid joke that didn’t land? I have. Still, looking back on some of the stunts on The Howard Stern Show I get the creeping sense that people who began to talk about “objectification” and the like had a point. This is where it came from. Take the “Miss Buttaface” contest, in which half-naked women with bags over their heads would have their bodies rated out of ten and then remove the bags to have their facial features mocked. Perhaps there was meant to be a sort of knowing humour in the fact that most of these poor lasses weren’t ugly at all while Stern and most of his staff looked like decaying bodies. Who knows.

Then there were the very weird segments in which porn stars would come into Stern’s studio, take off their clothes and ride a saddle-like masturbation device called a “sybian”. I understand the appeal of naked women, of course. But the appeal of listening to — or, if you had access to Howard TV, watching — a bunch of ageing sweaty men watch a young woman masturbate is beyond me. It’s not just voyeurism, it’s meta-voyeurism. It’s like watching a strip club on CCTV.

Of course, this wasn’t all that The Howard Stern Show was. It was also the cultural criticism, and the personalities, and the stories, and the sheer unpredictability. Any day a serial killer might call in or planes might crash into the Twin Towers. (Stern’s composure in the former case was evidence of his rich broadcasting talent. In the latter, on the other hand, he demanded dropping “a few nuclear bombs … let them suffer.”) It was raw-nerved entertainment.

This is the guy who sat at home for two years because of COVID?

It isn’t just about COVID. Stern went from being Mr Edgy to Mr Mainstream. He used to make fun of glossy hacks like Ellen DeGeneres but suddenly decided that they were good pals. He started being a judge on America’s Got Talent and talked about it endlessly on air. He was full of huffy newfound liberal opinions about how Trump voters were morons and vaccine sceptics were shitheads who should stay at home and die (Stern reportedly added that the vaccine should be mandatory, saying “fuck their freedom”).

Once, Stern had excoriated radio rival Don Imus in furious terms for leaving his wife and kids for a “trophy wife”. Now, divorced from his wife and kids, Stern was marrying a model who was fifteen years younger than him. I don’t know anything about his marriage, and it’s not my business, but the sound and fury seemed windier.

Cynics justifiably suggest that Stern saw which way the winds were blowing and got ahead of cancel culture. I am not suggesting that he should be cancelled (taking people to Internet court for something they said years ago, as if a skeleton has been discovered in their basement, is just lame). But it is still peculiar that he hasn’t — and possibly reducible to the fact that no one younger than 40 listens to Howard Stern.

Perhaps all he ever wanted was to be embraced by the mainstream. Watch out for rebels who just want to be accepted. Insulting famous people so fiercely and colourfully might have been a symptom of his bitterness for being looked down on. Once the likes of Jimmy Kimmel and Jennifer Aniston wanted to break bread with the man, he was home. (Much as it pains me to admit it, Vince McMahon is another example of this. The wrestling icon wanted nothing more than to be known as an all-round media mogul, and if his film studio and sports league had taken off he might have given up on the rassling altogether.)

But perhaps I’m being unfair. Stern will tell you he has changed. In his 2019 book Howard Stern Comes Again, Stern suggested that being in therapy had made him more sensitive to the effects of things he said and did. “I was an absolute maniac,” he sighed, “My narcissism was so strong that I was incapable of appreciating what somebody else might be feeling.” Maybe. It’s hard to believe that a bloke in his fifties hadn’t worked out that asking young women how many fellas they had fucked might make them feel uncomfortable. But then again, he was Howard Stern. He was a massive asshole when an intern brought in a picture of Stern that his mum had painted and he insulted her abilities and destroyed it — but it would not have made for especially compelling radio if he had said “thank you, how nice”. 

What I think is more revealing is when Stern reflects on the consequences of a cancer scare:

I … never spent a lot of time thinking about my death. Even now part of me feels that way — like there’s no way the world could continue without me — but as you start to get older and your body begins to break down, it does get you thinking about your legacy, what you’ll leave behind, what you’re proud of.

This I can believe. Stern’s agoraphobia is another sign of a morbid fear of death. I’m sure it’s true that he didn’t want to be remembered as the guy who insulted people and made porn stars strip — the irony being that trying to turn himself into the genial interviewer of Billie Eilish and Bruce Springsteen has driven off countless fans. Say what you like about Joe Rogan but when he tired of the juvenile content of The Man Show and Fear Factor he made a lot of interesting, innovative interviews. Stern couldn’t find a middle ground between crass sensationalism and milquetoast maundering. Now, forums and podcasts are full of ex-admirers complaining that he forgot to entertain them.

In this, Howard Stern has become 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.

Suddenly, life means something! Values have to be defended! Let’s get serious, dammit! The world needs us. The problem is that the sincerity has as little fundamental substance as the nastiness once did. It’s an emotional shift more than a moral, philosophical or artistic one.

Howard Stern has given a lot of people a lot of entertainment. He can be proud of that. But if you want to mean something you have to think about what is meaningful before it is too late. 

Thanks to @vovin5 for inspiring this piece