by M. Frederick Voorhees

Created on: February 28, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Howard Stern no longer gets rave reviews because he's lost his ability to improvise. In the beginning, Stern wasn't focused on trying to be famous; he was just being himself, raw and spontaneous. People liked that.

When I first heard Stern in his early years, I got the sense I was listening to an actual, real-life guy. He was uninhibited and inappropriatebut he was real.

Now Stern has fallen into that dark abyss that eventually swallows everyone who became famous accidentally. Just ask Tom Green, who became an MTV star by videotaping himself annoying random strangers on the street. Once they knew who he was, the strangers stopped getting annoyed and started asking for autographs. For some reason that just wasn't as funny.

Or what about Eminem? He's falling into that abyss now, too. Slim Shady's routine is less shocking nowadays. His lyrics, once unfettered and raw, are toned down and even tame. Where we once heard angry tirades we could relate to, we now get gentle diatribes about how it sucks to be rich and famous. Can you empathize with that plight?

We celebrate the personalities of Howard Stern and others' like him for one reason: they feel real to us. We're drawn to people who seem committed to being themselves, who aren't worried about ratings or consequences or lucrative new contracts. Even listeners who loathed Stern tuned in frequently during his heyday-just how appalling could one man dare to be?

But the same factors that propelled him to super-stardom now turn Howard Stern humbly back toward the earth. He is scripted, rehearsed and calculated. Even when he does improvise, he just isn't the same man who once had everything to gain and nothing to lose. The worst thing for a pop icon's career is when he forgets what it meant to be a nobody.

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