RIP Don Imus

Living below the Mason-Dixon, I’d never heard him until the “nappy-headed hoes” incident. I guess he might have been on some AM station down here.

 

I thought Stern’s Daniel Carver bits were funny too. And it was pretty clear Carver was being mocked for being a hateful bigot. I guess giving him a platform at all (which is probably why he agreed to participate) would be questionable by today’s standards and maybe it made white supremacists seem like harmless buffoons when, as we’ve seen, they’re extremely dangerous. But at the time, in the pre-social-media days, it was just funny and a little edgy. Nothing to say about Imus. I never really liked him or his show. His funny bits always seemed corny and dated.

 

Wow. We posted the exact same thing at the exact same time

 

I agreed then, but really wondering now if that’s the right call.

Not to drag this thread toward politics, but we’ve seen what’s happened in the past five years when you normalize horrible behavior.

 

I think that at times, Howard played both sides of mocking racists to laughing with some stereotypes. Unlike Imus, there never was a mean spiritedness about Howard.

 

I'm still wrapping my head around the whole Imus-Howard comparison.
I don't think it's fair of either one of them to compare them.
I loved Imus and still do love Howard.
Up until his shtick on television, Imus was a DJ. That's what he was. He would hit the wall perfectly with Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Cream. Give you numbers top and bottom. Play spots. And was great at it. No. He wasn't great. He was fucking great.
In radio, you have to have personality. You don't know if you are talking to 200 people or 30,000,000. The whole 1200 hamburgers......that was brilliant. You can't do the same thing forever.
As far as Howard, he was an awful DJ. He will go to his grave telling you that. Howard played to his audiences perfectly, and still does. Howard is a great interviewer. A lot of the great radio guys are awful "DJ's" but are great radio hosts. That's what Howard is. You don't get fucking quadrillions of dollars from Sirius without being really good.

 

In a Nation of 325,000,000 getting a niche market of a couple of million people is overwhelmingly lucrative. But reveals little about the quality and taste of the consumer. Right wing media is the same, it's a narrow and definitely minority media viewpoint. But the lack of competition on the right, makes Fox and the equivalent radio network of performers valuable. Stern makes a $100M a year because he drove a good percentage of terrestrial radio listeners to Satellite Pay Radio.

You're original point was right on target. Imus was a DJ who was uniquely funny and a radio DJ. He knew his music and that what he played. Stern was a guy who yelled booger on the radio and got ratings. And then yelled it louder and get more listeners.

 

He was on an FM station where I used to live and from 1995 to 2000 I would listen to Imus every morning.

My favorite bit was Cardinal O’Connor, which they didn’t do nearly often enough. Bernard always brought his A game for the Cardinal.

But compared to Stern, Imus was ordinarily pretty tame.

 

Good Lord.
When is your senior prom?

 

Bernie was Cardinal O'Connor.
It wasn't just him.
Lou screwing something up. Chuck reading something meaningless. Another useless sportscast.
Part of the shtick? Maybe.
But everyone played into it.