The Gadfly Trap

A gadfly is a person who interferes the status quo of a society or community by posing novel, potently upsetting questions, usually directed at authorities. The term is originally associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, in his defense when on trial for his life. [Wikipedia]

Imagine if you visited this site, only to discover that I had renounced my acerbic commentary on the world of music, and devoted my time to interviewing popular musicians of the day, in glowing “puff pieces”. How would you feel?

Betrayed?

From BIUL #2.

Of course you would. Because it is a betrayal.

Since the late 1990s, I’ve established the persona of a gadfly. I’m expected to attack pop cultural shibboleths. That’s what the audience expects of me. If an entertainer becomes rich and famous without practicing a demonstrable skill, I smell blood. Every time this happens, I dig until I find the Achilles heel, and strike. That is my role. There is no going back.

A gadfly “says what we’re all thinking”, and takes the resultant heat for it. A true gadfly never apologizes or retracts their opinions. If they do, their followers will eat them alive. Because they’re a fake. charlatan. An obsequious, wannabe Svengali. A pest to be exterminated and just as quickly forgotten.

Take Kathy Griffin, for example. (Please.) Had she not played victim after her severed-Trump-head stunt, her career would have survived, unscathed. Instead, she drowned the integrity of every word she’s ever spoken, with her tears. She proved to the world that she couldn’t really take the heat, and exited the kitchen. She’s so done, you probably forgot all about her until I brought her up once again.

There used to be this radio personality called Howard Stern. He was famous for his show’s unabashedly porn-o-holic atmosphere, and for his surgical deconstruction of pop-culture hypocrisy. His fan base was largely working-class dudes who loved to see the high-and-mighty taken down a few pegs. Stern was the underdog, the voice of the lowbrow. He was a bastion against phony corporate rock radio, as evidenced by his trumped-up battles with the aggro-crag demiurge Don Imus. He played himself in a laughably fictionalized movie of his life, and people ate it up.

Then he became a billionaire, thanks to a satellite-radio deal intended to transform him into a mogul. Suddenly he’s rubbing elbows with the Hollywood elitists he used to vilify, in the Hamptons. His boyhood as a pimply, envious creep caught up with him, and he renounced his sardonic persona to become a sort of vague media icon. His trophy wife and offspring became part of his act, unearned, to paint him as a loving father instead of a perverted ripoff of Joey Ramone. He rebuffed Artie Lange, who single-handedly had made his show “appointment listening”.

He handed the reins of his empire to Marci Turk, a woman who’d read a self-help book, and soon Stern was a would-be David Frost, conducting vanilla interviews. His army of back-patters assured him that this was his true strength, and not the exciting, unpredictable airtime battles that made him a star. In one fell swoop, he betrayed his entire audience and every single person that helped create him.

I’m assuming she never had to ride Stern’s dildo machine.

That’s why you never see his eyes. He’s a fraud, and he’s always known it.

That’s why no one gives a sideways shit about Stern anymore.

There was a drive-time radio duo based in New York that threatened Howard Stern so greatly, he placed a legal gag order on them that kept them from speaking his name; Opie & Anthony. This is the truth. Stern was so fearful of Gregg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony “Anthony” Cumia, he ran to his superiors and forced censorship on them. This and his gleeful selling-out are all the proof you need that Stern was and is a phony.

“I believe in censorship when it benefits me.” –Howard Stern

This is a man who made bank claiming he was “crucified by the FCC”. A hypocrite in a woman’s wig. And his PR team is so proficient, I still have to point all of this out.

Meanwhile, I can claim that Anthony Cumia is the funniest man in the history of radio, and I don’t have to add any caveats. Cumia has stuck to his (metaphorical) guns, and continued to be a man that can cross sabres with the funniest comedians and toughest gadflies in the country. The evidence is plentiful and readily available. As is the evidence of his past transgressions, which he has been wholly transparent about. He’s part of the #1 podcast* on iTunes. He won.

*It’s actually “podacast”, or somethin’. Tss.

Opie, on the other hand, is a whole other jar of flies.

I used to have no problem defending Opie; he was a necessary part of the show, beyond his silent machinations at the console. He had a sense of humor about himself. He had humility. He could roll with the punches. There was balance, even if he couldn’t crack jokes with the precision of Cumia or Jim Norton. He was the fraternity liaison, ready to paddle the pledges whenever necessary. He appreciated the importance of random destruction as a tension-breaker.

But little by little, he forsook the life of the gadfly, and followed the path of the Stern.

The first sign came with the inevitable hot young wife, and the urge to be the patriarch of a “normal family”. No Opie & Anthony recording that mentions Hughes’s wife is anything but tedium. Norton’s recurring pedophile character “Uncle Paul”, originally an Opie favorite, soon became a source of frustration for Hughes. Cumia and Norton’s bachelor lives were now a bone of contention on the show. Even though Opie and Anthony came up together in 90’s radio, they could no longer relate to one another, and it showed. Once Opie became a family man, the inherent self-censorship crept right in.

If you think I’m being harsh on the dude, you don’t read comments on YouTube. Good for you. Too bad Opie did, because there’s a huge contingent of commenters that hate his Long Island guts. 

They attack any chink in his armor they can find, and since he let it get to him, they won. His current efforts make him look like he was the one who got the lucky break, rather than his longtime partner. His radio show has all the edge of a plastic Frisbee. He employs the bafflingly unfunny Sherrod Small, the type of hot-air balloon he would have humiliated to the point of suicide fifteen years ago. He posts more pictures of himself on the beach than your average politician. He’s so obviously riding out his contract it might as well be a jet ski.

There are dozens of websites that were known for pushing the envelope into unspeakable territories, and in nearly every case the creator had children, and subsequently hid behind them. (Sometimes literally, in photos on awful front-page articles.) These are all people who desired the life of the gadfly, without the “mean” repercussions that life entails. They can dish out hate but not take it. They only want to hurt, because they believe they have been hurt. That’s a sadist, not a gadfly. They never understand that as ye sow, so shall ye reap. You get back what you give. If you give spite, spite is all you will receive.

That is the gadfly trap.

Comments Off on The Gadfly Trap

Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Podcastery, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned, Worst Of All