Matty stormed off the air this morning after his bosses ordered him to stop making jokes about Demi Lovato

You think the ratings are going to change with some other dingdong in that chair? The format, station power and marketing drive the ratings not some wizened creep.

As eeka points out, there's a difference between making fun of people and performatively trashing a deeply personal decision for yuks. What was his super funny joke he couldn't say about Lovato anyways? From the article it sounds like he was just saying he didn't think she should have the right to identify in a way he didn't like. Because he's an asshole.

he mentioned how he was told last year to stop making fun of Trump.

Funny how that didn't cause him to quit in a huff.

What he's getting at is that you can't make a joke about anything because someone, somewhere, will be offended. It's the same topic that Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappell, Bill Burr, and several other comedians have brought up in recent years.

Comedians used to make jokes about woman drivers, and stupid people from Poland. Comedians used to wear blackface and adopt stereotypical Black speech patterns to make fun of African-Americans.

Those jokes offended people, and those jokes became unacceptable many decades ago, yet somehow the profession of "comedian" has survived. Somehow, those poor comedians of the 50s and 60s found other things to make jokes about (the good ones, anyway), and their audiences continued to laugh. Somehow, I don't think that asking comedians to refrain from mocking the mere existence of non-binary people means that we have finally, at long last, run out of things to make jokes about.

What he's getting at is that you can't make a joke about anything because someone, somewhere, will be offended.

You can make any damn jokes you want, any time and place you want to make them.

What you can't do is make jokes into a microphone that is in turn connected to a radio transmitter, while on the clock as a salaried employee, that the owners of the microphone and the radio transmitter and the employer paying your salary, don't want you to make.

But ratings shouldn't be a metric of greatness.

This is a anecdata, but:

The 40-something white moms in my friend circle who drive kids to school in the morning? They listen to Matty because that is the same non-threatening morning show that their moms let them listen to in the backseat with their siblings/friends in the late 80s+90s. It’s nostalgia. I mean some of my mom friends listen to country, but if the kids don’t like country then the compromise is Matty.

Besides, how else are you going to win tickets to the Kiss Concert (Kiss 108 not Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter) if you don’t listen to Matty?

Whose career was destroyed?

Also “cancel culture” is fiction and does not exist.

Here’s the thing. It’s ok to say politically incorrect things once in a while. It’s ok to not be perfect with pronouns or to be in-artful when talking about race, ethnicity, or gender because you know what? None of us are prefect.

It’s not about being perfect, it’s about how you react. Like if you make a comment here at UHub and refer to Demi Lovato as ‘she’ and someone here corrects you and says ‘they’, there is no need to get pissy and feel victimized. Don’t double down is what I am saying.

Look, I still mess up pronouns as a +40 hetero male. When I am corrected I choose to apologize and earnestly try to do better going forward rather than go on an anti-woke crusade. Like, when I call someone I just met Dave and I am corrected with “It’s David” I don’t go on a rant about “wokeness” and get all sad that I am “canceled”. I just say sorry, try to do better, and move on. I respect the individual choice.

For all the people that are saying “stop being so sensitive” I reply back: stop being so sensitive. Simply take feedback in stride and just try and do better and stop pretending like you are the ones being victimized because trans or non-bianary people want visibility and acceptance.

You're attacking people for making offensive comments based on stereotypes, but in the same breath stereotyping and judging everyone who disagrees with you on this issue

Here's where you went off the rails. Civility is not an "issue", it is a behavior, as is its converse. Being female or Black or gay or trans does not infringe on others. Being a loud uncouth uncivil boor does.

falls under the trans umbrella

Right you are.

It isn't a cliche, it's a metaphor that is all too apt for a lot of contemporary behaviors.

I mean, if I were Matty's boss and he just very publicly told me to eat shit on the air, I sure wouldn't have him back.

wasn't actually telling it like it is? Wow, what a surprise!

Is in NYC, not Kansas. Blame New Yorkers

That's the same clip that Adam posted in the article. What we haven't heard (AFAIK) is the actual joke that got him spoken to.

The problem I have with commercial stations like KISS 108 is that they are stuck in a TOP 40 time warp from 40 years ago (even some of the same DJs!).

can be really useful if you love the little sea they're trawling but find that streamers like Spotify and satellite radio stations rarely plumb the depths. At least the doughy old punks and bebop jazzbos and exotica weirdos are obsessives in plowing their narrow furrows, with a much more profound and broad sense of history: they routinely introduce me to rarities and obscurities not found on mass-market channels. If you have a lifelong appreciation for a particular genre, you don't want to hear the same greatest-hits compilations all the time.

I always feel bad for people that have gotten stuck in a glory-days rut, shutting their ears to music that happened after they got out of high school or college or their 20s. Me, I've never stopped listening to new music, including dopey teen-oriented pop: there's often a lot of fine craft in there. My sources include a huge iTunes library (not a track of it pirated), a few cubic yards of ancient vinyl, a couple dozen podcasts, radio, YouTube in a pinch, and streaming services.

I still spend plenty of time listening to hip-hop, blues, jazz (the late-20s/early 30s period speaks to me for some reason), old soul and R&B (I adore The Secret Spot on ERS), old country, folk, classical, reggae, a few decades of electronic dance music (pleasantly surprised that a few kids are producing new drum n' bass in 2021, sue me), and assorted traditional musics from around the world. Bossa nova here, the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir there, what have you: I'll eat that. (I've noticed that food dorkery and music dorkery, like many nerdly passions, have a lot in common: I can be a painful bore to normies, but am useful to know when there's a problem to solve.)

Every genre, old or new, benefits from scholarly curation if you dig it. When I'm in the mood for punk and noise and non-poppy metal, it's tough to beat a middle-aged college-radio DJ like Joanie Lindstrom of the Late Risers' Club on MBR. (I could barely contain my giddy fanboy glee when I finally met her in person and got to chat with her for 20 minutes at a Buzzcocks show five or so years ago. Judging from the selfies, I was grinning like a goddamned idiot the whole time, oof.) But the fact is that she's been bringing me fresh joys since she was new at it. Long live them aging punks, and erudite record-spinning geeks of every stripe.

still share at least one hateful, superannuated prejudice.