Growing up in the 1980s, I listened to the two classic rock stations in Philadelphia, WYSP and WMMR. Especially in the morning as I got ready for school. I probably had a mullet.
John DeBella was the DJ in the 6am-10am drive-time spot on WMMR. He hosted a radio show called the Morning Zoo. It was more or less what you'd expect. The same jokes every day, the same segues, etc. Early 80s shlock, the same schlock that had been spewed on radio since the 1950s. But the only game in town, so we listened. It was just what you did. There wasn't anything else to listen to. While we got ready for school. Where we didn't want to go. Where we learned nothing. I had listened to it for five years. You can hear a bit of it here. I'd suggest you give it a listen for later contrast, it's not very long and you really only need to listen to about 15 seconds to get the idea.
Then in 1986, Howard Stern came into the Philadelphia market in the same time slot on the competing station.
Philadelphia was the second market Stern was in after NYC. It was early in his syndication, and he was a nobody in Philadelphia. He was not yet the "king of all media" as he would claim later. And if you know anything about Philadelphia sports teams, you know that we aren’t exactly a welcoming bunch.
Here's what Stern did on his first day in Philadelphia. It was summertime. I was listening. I was working at a gas station.
If you don't have the patience to listen, Stern was incredibly mean and competitive, nothing like the statesman he is now. Stern was on the ascent, he was hungry for market, he had four hours of time to fill up every day, and he had to talk about something, so he talked about what was actually happening. What was happening in the moment.
He began viciously attacking DeBella and his Morning Zoo from day one. He made fun of DeBella's show and DeBella himself, extremely personally, mercilessly. It became absolutely brutal. It was, in retrospect, completely awful.
But if you listened to both above clips, you are getting the actual vibe. You are beginning to understand what kind of brutal ass-whipping is on the way for fifty years of Morning Zoo bullshit having been crammed down the throats of radio listeners. Hoo boy. It's not going to be pretty. Stern encourages someone who threatens to jump from the fifth floor in order to commit suicide, suggesting they ascend to the sixth before the jump. Fuck them. 6:18 at k-rock, we'll be right back. Holy shit.
DeBella simply did not share Stern's Machiavellian operating ethos. He sometimes tried to parry Stern's attacks but it was always half-hearted and forced. There was no joy in it. He was just doing his job and this maniac started to pummel him out of nowhere. It became a true spectacle at times, where you could not turn your eyes away from this horrific crushing of one soul by another.
When DeBella and his wife divorced, Stern put DeBella's wife on his radio show's "Dial a Date" segment. DeBella's wife then would go on dates, followed by a Stern flunky who would interview both the suitor and DeBella's wife after the date, intimating that they either already had sex or would soon have sex. It was incredibly cruel on both Stern's part and on DeBella's wife's part.
And it was marvelous.
Stern won us over entirely. Even Philadelphia, the town that throws batteries at its own sports mascots, welcomed in Stern. Even to this day, I can remember laughing myself into tears listening to him. Certainly at age 15, I probably hadn't laughed that hard at anything before. We laughed because it was mean. Because it was transgressive. Because it was gross. Because we were 15. Sure. But you forgot this one bit. We knew it then.
We laughed because it was honest. It was what was actually happening. We understood this. Stern did not have a morning radio show where he used carts to make predictable fart sounds at precise times and told us all when we were permitted to have fun. On which days we were permitted to have fun. Stern said fuck all that, told us that he was a morning radio host that wanted to crush his competition. Fuck the competition. That he hated John DeBella, that he hated that entire formulation of what radio was supposed to be. That it sucked and needed to be torn down. And that was true. It was the truth. We understood what he opposed was bullshit even as we understood that he was not a good man.
It wasn't fair that John DeBella took the collective ass whipping built up over 50 years of utter garbage being fed to us by the radio collective. But take that ass whipping he did, and we cheered it on, each of us to a gradually lesser extent as time went on, each based on our own ambient level of psychopathy. And Stern made it funny enough to be bearable. He could make the truth funny, and there is nothing as powerful as this. Especially when the lies are so Morning-Zoo threadbare. Stern took it way, way, way too far, the point was made, long after already conceded. It got truly obscene.
DeBella's wife eventually committed suicide, and, well. That was that. The mass psychotic ass-whipping had been completed via tragedy. A completely psychopathic end to a psychopathic beginning. We wandered off. But old radio was dead, there could be no doubt of that.
So.
If you are one of these people who says "I just can't understand how people can stand Donald Trump," you proably need to listen to the two YouTube videos I posted above and listen to the contrast. Howard Stern didn't become popular outside of a context. You can get all the context you need from the morning zoo clip, the stuff we'd been fed for fifty years before Stern showed up. The difference is all you need to understand.
How many times have you heard politicians say the same happy bullshit over and over again? While they do nothing. While gerrymandering dictates whom our representatives shall be in entirety. While DNC and RNC cabals dictate whom our next king shall be. While we continually have to choose between Duff Light and Duff Dry. While they represent nothing. While they are for sale to the highest bidder. While we have our pockets picked. Like Charlie and Lucy and the football. This is the political equivalent of the Morning Zoo. Fucking humpday every day. Hawaiian shirt Fridays everybody.
This is why we have Donald Trump, a poor simulacrum of Stern's utter brilliance. It's so obvious. He walked up to the Morning Zoo, said hey fuck all this, this is no fun at all. And proceeded to tell the truth about what was actually happening in the moment. Trump's talent is a hundredth of the talent of Stern's. And his loyalty to honesty a hundred thousandth, a millionth. But it doesn't matter.
People are just so hungry for that one little shred of truth and a shot at real change that it doesn't matter. They are so desperate for anyone to give that that one fuck you to the Morning Zoo. That fuck you to the same Monty Python signoff song every day. A fuck you to Hawaiian shirt Fridays. A fuck you to that miserable "humpday humpday humpday" cart play. A fuck you to that fake radio voice. Fuck you to your "screamer of the week." Fuck you to "it might rain it might not" when it's 50% chance of showers.
Middle finger. Eat shit and die. Fucking burn. You can only imagine the power of truth against that complete garbage when the truth is entertaining. It is endless. Old radio deserved to burn. It almost deserved what DeBella got for it. Not in the end, but at least in the beginning. It wasn't DeBella's fault, he just happened to be left standing when the last chair was pulled, and the brutal beating he took was for all those before him. We didn't even understand that we hated it so much before we were forced to take a look at it.
You are a perhaps a PhD. You are an honors graduate. You went to MIT or Stanford. A professor. Maybe you're a CEO. Or a Google developer or mid-level manager making $300k per year. And you don't understand. I find myself with an audience of you somehow, although I have no degree. So perhaps I've forged enough of a bridge between the worlds that I can help you understand, it feels so important that you understand, so that we can regroup and avoid a civil war.
The political popularity of Donald Trump is not due to any particular allegiance to Donald Trump the man. It is instead, a total rejection of the Morning Zoo. A completely unhinged, animalistic response to the normalization of the total banal corruption of politics. Donald Trump is only the Stern that allows us to act psychopathically, a total overreaction to our inability to figure out exactly what has been bugging us all about the nonsense that has filled our ears since at least 1988.
It isn't racism. Nope. You wish it were that simple. It isn't backwoods hicks making decisions that aren't in their best interests. It isn't low information voters. It isn't a conspiracy. It isn’t red-state Karens. It isn’t Russian bots. The exit poll numbers show us that. It doesn't even make sense. It needs not. It is rage. It is unbridled, animalistic, unhinged rage. There is no coherence to it. There does not need to be. A psychotic incident needs not be coherent. It is the rage of people who didn't even understand exactly what there was to be enraged about before Trump showed up and hinted at what it should be. It is the rage of people promised hope and change but who wound up still in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the rage of those given the binary choice between a machine-politics Clinton and a psychopath Trump. It is the rage of people who cannot see an issue come to the floor of the House without the consent of a cabal. This is how it displays itself. Not as some kind of force that can be parried with articles in The Atlantic. Nope. It’s gonna put your wife on Dial-a-Date in response.
I voted for Joe Biden. But not really. I held my nose and I voted against Donald Trump. There was a terrible choice and I made the least worst one that I felt responsible. More importantly, I am glad Biden won. If he had not won, I would not be posting this, because we would not have had a breather from this unbridled rage, and it would have been lost in the noise, completely pointless. But Joe Biden is a part of the Morning Zoo and always will be. The center cannot hold. We have been witness to a shift in politics that will no longer tolerate the Zoo Crew. We need to come to Jesus here or we shall be swept away in a literal civil war the toll of which will be utter ruin for all of us. It is so important that you understand. It is time to be honest, and adult and stop bickering about bullshit.
The Morning Zoo is dead. If we rally around zookeepers, we can expect to get our ass whipped. The ass whipping can end now or it can continue. And we can eventually expect a literal civil war if it doesn’t.
I would hold back on publishing this, it clearly isn’t done, but I’ll pick it up in the next post I suppose. It ain’t gonna get better. And time is of the essence.