If this is a clarion call for cleanliness, the FCC is facing no small task.
No matter how many bras they've unfastened or belch sound effects they have cued up, most edgy DJs bristle at the label ''shock jock.'' No, they correct, they're not being shocking, they're doing ''real'' or ''guy'' talk. But Bubba the Love Sponge, 37, makes no such distinction. ''Anyone who is afraid of any type of adjective or label on the radio is a pussy,'' says the 295-pound bad boy, who uses the word shock almost as much as he does the word pussy, which is almost as much as most people use the word the. And it is just such a vocabulary that has hoisted Bubba into the top 20 of all syndicated morning-drive shows: Clear Channel has put him on four stations throughout Florida and Georgia, as well as on XM Satellite Radio, and recently moved him into Hartford to see how he plays in the Northeast.
Bubba's show is a nonstop cavalcade of rants, raunchiness, and reprobation. On a Monday morning in January, Bubba (who legally changed his name from Todd Clem to his radio moniker in 1998) plowed through most of the seven deadly sins, including pride (bragging about beating rival radio team Lex & Terry), anger (complaining that St. Petersburg, Fla., cops don't arrest black criminals), and -- over and over -- lust (slaphappy strippers visiting with a bag of absurdly intricate sex toys). One could argue that in the past he's even managed to incorporate a murder into his show: In 2002 he was acquitted of animal-cruelty charges for narrating live the killing and skinning of a wild boar in the station's parking lot. Then there were the random, unranked sins, like playing a regurgitative symphony of him and his producers vomiting loudly in the studio. And it is just this kind of regular wallowing in puerility that has had Stern label him a Howard Stern ''clone.''
''Howard didn't invent men being men,'' huffs Bubba, who is hardly the only one to face the accusation. Every time chunks are blown, gas is passed, or clothes are whipped off by any DJ, it further convinces Stern of his age-old complaint that the radio dial is filled with jocks stealing his act. (It's a theory Stern recently expanded to cover TV, suing ABC on the grounds that the network stole Are You Hot? from him. ABC and Stern have settled.) There is no questioning Stern's influence: Though radio personalities had pushed limits before him (like Bill Ballance and Stern's No. 1 nemesis, Don Imus, in the '70s), nobody pushed them quite as far and as unrelentingly...and certainly not with as much savvy and success.
''While there have always been rabble-rousers, they have usually been local stories,'' says Radio & Records editor Al Peterson. ''Whereas Howard, by going national, was the standard-bearer.'' (Reps for the notoriously outspoken yet press-shy Stern did not return calls.) Now the man once considered a loose cannon is a safe bet for stations looking to win morning drive. He consistently ranks as the No. 1 syndicated morning DJ: In any given 15-minute period, there are 1.5 million people listening to him on 43 stations.
