All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Howard Stern has been doing roughly the same shtick for 30 years. Since WRNW in Westchester County, New York, he has thrown lunch meat at strippers' asses, hosted "Homeless Jeopardy," and done more than anyone since Shakespeare to turn the fart joke into an art form. He has paid for breast enhancement surgery, put pretty young things into a spank machine, and presided over lesbian dial-a-date segments.
For these and other sins, some people think Stern crosses the line of decency and should be kicked off the air. For years, his response has been, essentially, Can't you take a joke? But last year, something changed. Instead of getting an earful from Angry Old Woman or some pissed-off moralizer, Stern got busted by the government. The Federal Communications Commission, responsible for keeping indecency off the public airwaves, hit him with a $495,000 fine in April. That's not so funny. So Stern changed, too – into a flag-waving defender of the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech, a pervy Tom Paine of the air. Now the Feds are interfering with his right to make art, to create something, Stern says.
This could be savvy marketing. It could be heartfelt outrage. It could be both. Why make the distinction when Jerry Falwell doesn't? By taking his case to 12 million listeners every week, Stern is turning locker-room humor into a constitutional cause. He's using his show as a platform to prick (as it were) the FCC's veil of authority. Thanks to his particular talent for connecting, for making each listener feel talked to instead of at, Stern is transforming an abstract fight about rights and values into one about the guy next door, or at least the guy down the dial.
When it became obvious that even the mighty Howard Stern was going to lose that fight, he decided to leave the dial entirely. Next January he'll start broadcasting his show on satellite radio – nationwide reach, no FCC oversight, no commercials to interrupt the vibe (and maybe no listeners, but we'll get to that later). "I still feel like I gotta prove something," he said after announcing the move. "There are a lot of people hoping I fail. But I like that. I need to be hated."
At last, Stern has become a hero to an audience larger than those of us who believe anal sex deserves, ahem, wider discussion. Playing the "only kidding" card always suggested that speech has no consequences. And the whole point of free speech, as Stern has at last seemed to discover, is consequences. For him, they have been specific and expensive: $2.5 million in fines from the FCC since his career began. Stern's first significant fine came in 1995, $1.7 million paid by Infinity Broadcasting – the owner of his show – to settle up infractions dating back to 1990. Then it was a few thousand here and there, until last year.
Now Howard Stern is taking on not just one establishment but two: the FCC indecency cops and the terrestrial radio conglomerates. That makes him not just a vulgarian, but a renegade.
There are vacationing Icelanders who know the details: Stern will take his show (and presumably a significant chunk of his listeners) to Sirius Satellite Radio, in exchange for $500 million over five years. In the business, they have a term for that kind of money: a shitload.
If that bit of highly specialized vocabulary makes it to the newsstand, I will have Stern to thank. You could talk about Stern and his effect on mass culture without resorting to vulgarities, but why would you want to? Like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, Stern has fought to make the world safe for smut, because smut makes people laugh. And if you don't think that's a worthy cause, go screw yourself.
And, really, have fun doing it. I can recommend some books.
A Long Islander with a teenager's taste for pornography, Stern used to be syndicated by the biggest oligopoly in the radio business, Clear Channel. Last April, Clear Channel dropped him. But the actual owner of the show, Infinity Broadcasting (a division of Viacom and the second-biggest radio oligopoly), continued to fight the FCC. And why wouldn't they? Even after $100 million in production costs (including Stern's $30 million salary), analysts say the show clears at least $25 million a year.
For all Stern's complaints about the FCC, the truth is that government policies made him what he is today. When the government lifted regulations on radio station ownership in the mid-'90s, communications giants like Clear Channel muscled their way into local markets – so no more Dave in the Morning or Billy the Wonder Weasel. Larger-than-life national personalities like Stern and Rush Limbaugh replaced quirky local hosts. Stern can now be heard on 40 stations nationwide. He may be pissed at the FCC for telling him what not to say, but he should send them a thank-you note for allowing him to spray himself across such a big audience.
To those fans, the hoopla Stern creates is a mark of bravery. His ribald humor is not as important, they contend, as his radical honesty about race, class, and gender, and none of that would mean anything if he weren't honest about himself. For them, Stern's admission that he is "hung like a raisin" and his frankness about his own prejudices changes the calculus of offense. He is a hypocrisy-buster, a truth-teller, a scatological sage.
This is a lovely argument, though hard to buy when Stern is encouraging some young, er, actress to describe her first girl-on-girl sex scene.
When the FCC goes after Stern, even those of us who like hearing about girl-on-girl sex (and, really, who among us does not?) don't defend him on artistic grounds. Like Larry Flynt or the Ku Klux Klan, Stern has to be defended on the precarious ground of the slippery slope: You may not like what he says, but if the government shuts him up, who will they silence next?
Let's be honest: When the Man goes after Flynt or the Klan, the Man is slapping the hand of people we would not sit next to on the bus. But Stern just tells dirty jokes.
That makes the fight easier to wage in good conscience because it lowers the level of debate. That's his art, if he has one: making the form and content of speech impossible to separate. Prissy speech police may object to his making jokes about the handicapped or Mexicans or midgets; more broad-minded liberals object to his not fighting for these jokes vigorously enough. Yet fundamentally, Stern's vulgarity is so completely free of political content that we're forced to defend it on its own terms – it's gross, sure, but a lot of people think it's funny, and you can always change the channel. Being brazen has turned out to be the most political act Stern has ever performed.
On Stern's Web site, below the Vagina Corner link and above the 30-Second Fart download, is a poster: The Passion of the Stern. It depicts him in a bloody crown of thorns. The movie-ad parody feels only slightly ironic (even though its director is listed as "Smell Gibson"). For Stern, the connection between crude self-revelation and the fate of the free world is obvious: It's all about him. This is the guy who crowned himself King of All Media, and everyone knows too much self-coronation will make you go blind.
But when Stern insists that George W. Bush (or outgoing FCC chair Michael Powell or Clear Channel or the religious right) has made it a mission to set about ruining his life, it starts to sound paranoid, if not megalomaniacal. When he says, "We are in a war. It's a cultural war," the we is not an abstraction – it's royal. "I call on all fans of the show to vote against Bush," Stern told his audience last spring. "We're going to deliver the White House to John Kerry." The enemies list doesn't stop there: "I just want to bury Clear Channel. I want to make every one of their radio stations worth 3 cents," he said on the air last fall. "You sons of bitches, I will bury you."
Stern's unenlightened self-interest can sometimes seem as vulgar as his guests' on-air pubic-hair trimming, and not half as funny. He seems to know that this fight is all about him, but not always why or how. As he told Powell in a live radio run-in, "I think it's a sad day … when the marketplace no longer determines what is indecent." The marketplace is, of course, exactly the wrong mechanism for determining what's indecent, and Stern of all people should know that. The marketplace loves Stern precisely because he's indecent and transgressive, but that continues only if people keep being offended. Wider acceptance of Stern's raw, self-revelatory monologues and jokes about bodily functions would kill his act. The more pervasive vulgar speech is – or, using his terms, the more the market openly tolerates it – the more it drives down his shock jock value.
Lucky for Sirius, shock appeal isn't Stern's only weapon. Listeners "will certainly follow him, because he's a friend," says Jay Clark, executive vice president of programming for Sirius. "They wake up with this man every morning, and they've been doing it for years. That's a big hole in your life if this person goes away. That's the personal touch." When Sirius launched its service in 2002, it was almost a year behind its only competitor, XM – and dismissed as an also-ran. But since Sirius announced it had picked up Stern in October, its stock price has shot up 60 percent. Sirius started 2004 with 260,000 subscribers; now it has more than 1.3 million.
On his show in January, Stern sounded a little less certain. "Listen, I know everyone's not going to come with us. I know that, and I'm cool with that. It's sad that I gotta give up any listener, one listener," he said. "It's gonna be weird our first couple of days there, it's gonna be a whole new situation, a whole new way of doing things."
For starters, new curse words. "I'm not saying the whole show's gonna be one big X-rated show. But I am gonna be using the f-word. You know, sparingly. And I'm gonna be using the c-word, for women's privates," he said on the air. "I think that word is funny. I use it all the time. In my psychiatrist's office I used it three times the other day."
And why not? Stern is moving to safe harbor. Before announcing his departure in Jan�uary, Powell told an audience at the Con�sumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that satellite deserved a wide berth. "I think it's a dan�gerous thing to start talking about extending government oversight of content to other media just to level the playing field," Powell said.
Sirius' plan still might not work – without the FCC to battle, Stern could wind up like Lenny Bruce, caught up in a solipsistic loop, reading his own court transcripts and struggling to generate controversy in a culture that's gotten over it. Or at least over him.
That would be a shame, because Stern has pulled off the trick of building a we're-all-pals relationship with his audience, all the more impressive for its galling disconnect from reality. Despite being the most mass of all mass media, broadcast radio has the sensory appeal of someone whispering in your ear. With satellite radio, this sleight of hand is even easier to pull off. You pay for satellite. You pick one of hundreds of carefully targeted channels. Once you're tuned in, if it feels like you and the DJ are one on one, that's because you are. That's the same game that Stern has always played; his move to satellite makes the rise of more deeply personalized media seem inevitable.
It might not be a revolution, but it is the Pilgrims setting sail: Stern is staking his claim on the coming individualized, on-demand media world. There will be more voices and more places to hear them. Our options will grow – and have grown – beyond changing the channel: Now we can start one.
Satellite radio itself may not be the technology upon which our great narrowcasted future is built – it may turn out to be the laserdisc or the Betamax. Either way, Stern's move heralds the future of radio, and maybe of media in general. He has made it possible to look at the chaos of individually produced enterprises (podcasters and print-on-demand publishers and bloggers and yes, even me! Me! Me! Wonkette!) on the fringe of the media world and suddenly see a new center.
A center that is not just about anal sex and flatulence, but about passion. After all, almost every amateur media venture – at least the ones worth paying attention to – starts out of spite. You are unsatisfied with something. You feel like something is being ignored. You are offended. You make a movie on your laptop because you hate Michael Moore; you start doing an Internet broadcast because your local radio station isn't playing enough Tuvan throat-singers. You start a blog because magazine editors won't let you write about indelicate sex acts and privatizing Social Security in the same screed.
The future that Stern is defining actually isn't about speech. It's about a less legalistic, more human freedom: expression. The best revolutions, like the best comedy, come from rage – tricksters who nudge and needle the establishment until it can't help but change. Maybe he's just in it for the money or the freedom from the Man or the cheap laughs. But he might figure out along the way what those bloggers and filmmakers and podcasters are learning – that it's possible to create and consume individualized, personalized media that lives up to a community standard of you.
In the country of the blog, the one-man show is king of all media.
Unlike analog AM/FM transmissions, these digital signals sent by satellite to XM and Sirius subscribers are immune to static and interference. – Paul Boutin
HOW IT WORKS 1. An XM or Sirius ground station beams multichannel programming to satellites 30,000 miles in the sky. 2. The satellites relay the broadcast back to the continental US. 3. Repeaters on the ground spread the signal through urban canyons and other drop-out areas. 4. Tuners scan for unique activation codes to pick up a subscriber's selected channels.
HOW TO GET IT First choose XM or Sirius service. Then consider Wired's picks for top home, portable, and car devices.
SERVICES XM Satellite Radio: 136 channels, with 68 playing commercial-free music. XM has exclusive satellite coverage of MLB, Nascar, plus former Morning Edition host Bob Edwards. $10 per month, xmradio.com Sirius Satellite Radio: 121 channels, with 65 playing commercial-free music. Can't stand Howard Stern? Tune into NPR, the NFL, NBA, or Eminem's Shade 45 channel. $13 per month, sirius.com
HOME/OFFICE Polk Audio XRt12: is component tuner sports analog and digital outputs, plus video-out to display song info on a TV screen. $330, polkaudio.com/xm Tivoli Model Satellite: Pairing a Sirius tuner and Henry Kloss AM/FM analog circuitry, the Tivoli delivers big sound from a 3-inch speaker. $300, tivoliaudio.com
PORTABLE Delphi MyFi: A pocket-size portable with home and car adapters, the MyFi can record up to five hours of XM. $350, shopdelphi.com Audiovox SIR-PNP3: This plug-and-play receiver for home or car features a large display and easily understood interface. $100 (plus $50 per dock), audiovox.com
CAR Delphi XM SkyFi2: Less than 5 inches across, the SkyFi transmits XM's signal as an analog broadcast to an FM tuner in the car or at home. $130, shopdelphi.com JVC KT-SR2000: This adjustable dock adheres to windshields, making it the best bet for drivers looking to upgrade. $100 (plus $50 per dock), jvc.com
WHAT'S NEXT Sirius will add a few channels of satellite TV in 2006, with programming aimed at kids in the backseat.
Ana Marie Cox (edit@wonkette.com) is editor of the DC gossip blog Wonkette.
Howard Stern Photo Illustration by Michael Elins
Polk Audio XRt12
Tivoli Model Satellite
Delphi MyFi Craig Maxwell
Audiovox SIR-PNP3
Delphi XM SkyFi2
JVC KT-SR2000
Feature:
| Howard Stern and the Satellite Wars
Plus:
