The Kid Mero: ‘Let Me Get in There and Shake Shit Up’

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or the past month, The Kid Mero — comedian, podcast host, and writer known for his irreverent humor and distinctly New York sensibility — has hosted the morning show on Hot 97, his hometown’s most influential and longstanding hip-hop radio station. Hot 97 has played an outsize role for decades in debuting new hits, anointing superstars, and wading into major cultural debates; Mero’s most recent predecessor in the morning-show role is Ebro Darden, who announced the end of his 20-plus-year tenure at the station in December. Those are big shoes to fill, but Mero has stepped into them with his customary smoothness, quickly injecting a millennial POV into the airwaves alongside co-hosts Shani Kulture, Miabelle, Kazeem Famuyide, and DJ Kast One. For anyone who’s watched his career grow from mid-aughts rap blogs to podcasting, late-night television, and now radio, it’s a move that makes perfect sense.

On a recent morning, Mayor Zohran Mamdani calls in to Mornings With Mero — by now New York’s 34-year-old mayor is something of a recurring character on the show — and Mero jokingly takes him to task about the piles of snow still lingering in the streets. In their discussion of the Grammys last week, callers expressed disbelief that any rapper not from New York could be crowned the greatest.

In a short time, Mero has managed to make the radio relevant to audiences that had spent years moving away from it. A hallmark of the show is the well-coordinated clips posted to social media each morning. It’s an easy enough move, since the videos on today’s short-form video behemoths — typically someone in front of a microphone offering their take on something they’d heard about — are basically just old-school radio, updated for a newer medium. Mero’s POV is decidedly informed by the internet era, having cut his teeth blogging about rap in the 2000s and co-hosting the Vice and Showtime series Desus & Mero, where he and co-host Desus Nice brought their long-running online series Bodega Boys into the mainstream. 

Now, as Hot 97’s newest host, he’s at the forefront of a changing rap culture and in a position to calibrate the city’s hip-hop scene. A long-running criticism of the station’s rap coverage in recent years has been that it ignored the voices of younger artists; for Mero’s part, that seems to be where he finds the most energy. As a father of four, he’s keenly aware of what the next generation is paying attention to. He credits his son for putting him on to Playboi Carti’s music, and he shouts out Xaviersobased during our interview. 

Mero is also speaking every morning to a city in a period of transformation, as its new mayor hopes to bring a more egalitarian version of politics to the country’s largest metropolis. Both figures, Mamdani and Mero, grew their influence up from the ground level and make for an optimistic vision for the future. The Kid Mero talked to Rolling Stone about living up to the task of being the voice of the city, fatherhood, and why he sees terrestrial radio as a natural next step for him to “create moments” for New York, bridge digital and legacy culture, and do it all for “the Mero of 10, 15 years ago,” while keeping four kids, a mortgage, and his Bronx-born sensibility firmly in mind.

This is your third week on the air. What’s the vibes there?
Great. You know what I mean? Great vibes. Everybody’s calling in like, “Yo, you’re doing your thing. We so happy for you. Yo, we proud of you, bro. You son of the Bronx.” You used to be sitting in the back of the car smoking blunts to this. Now I’m the host of it. You know? It’s just crazy. But the vibes are good, man. The energy’s good. Everybody’s positive. Even the people that left [the station] were like, “Yo, go do your thing.” Shout-out to Ebro and them. But man, my circadian rhythm is fucked up.

Because you’re up early.
But other than that, we’re good. I haven’t slept regularly in 15 years, man. So I’m not tripping off of that.

What was the process of getting this job like? When did you know that you were in the running for this gig?
Yo, honestly, as far as I know, there wasn’t even a running… I got offstage, and I was approached by [someone]. He was like, “Yo, I work at Hot 97, can we find some time to sit down?” So I go over there, and [another person] writes a number on a piece of paper, folds it and slides it across the table. This is some Mad Men shit. And I opened it up. I was like, “I got four kids and two mortgages. You have to come up.” We started negotiating and stuff, going back and forth on terms and things like that. And the whole time they were like, “Yo, you’re the guy. There’s no plan B. Let’s get you what you need and go from there.”

Was there an onboarding process to working in radio after those other mediums?
Honestly, just timing and cadence. With radio, there’s a structure. It’s like, “Yo, we got to get to these ads, we got to get to this music, we got to get to this.” So to me, that was really the only adjustment — keeping an eye on that clock in the corner of the studio. And then also not cursing and catching SEC violations.

That must be hard.
It was hard, but it wasn’t hard. I got four kids, bro. You know what I mean? I be in situations all the time where I’m like, “Yo, you can’t be up here being like, ‘Fuck, this motherfucker looked crazy.’” Like, “Bro, this is a kindergarten graduation. What are you doing? You sound insane.” So I’m like, “All right, I know how to go from G, to PG, to NC-17 when needed.”

One of my favorite parts of the show is the live call-ins — like when you had the graffiti writer Mister call in. How do you think about bringing those kinds of culturally specific New York voices onto Hot 97?
Yo, not to sound corny, but Hot 97 is hip-hop. It’s New York hip-hop. If you think about basketball in New York, it’s like, “Oh, the New York Knicks.” If you think about baseball in New York, you think, “Oh, it’s New York Yankees.” If you think about hip-hop in New York, it’s like, “Oh, Hot 97.” So bringing all aspects of it, like graffiti and all that other stuff — because people might not necessarily know about it. But for me, this is what hip-hop is. It’s like, “Yo, we out bombing, drinking 40s, listening to Funkmaster Flex on the radio in the car.” So to me, that aspect of the culture of hip-hop was important. So having [Mister] calling — and that went crazy on digital, bro, that did numbers. Because people weren’t expecting like, “Yo, Mero’s going to come up here and really, like, blow, splash Mero sauce all over this place.” Don’t get it on you!

And do you feel like you’ve had a responsibility to highlight New York artists?
Yes and no. Listen, Max B and Fetty Wap both came out of jail [within a] year … “We’re back.” So I think, yes, there is a responsibility for me. People like Xaviersobased, who are not necessarily on everybody’s radar, but they’re hip-hop and they’re New York City kids. So evolving with hip-hop, right? The genre’s got 16 million different flavors. Let’s highlight all of them, man. Why not?

Are you on TikTok? I’ve heard you saying “unc.” You know the phrases.
I’m on it as an observer, you know what I’m saying? I’m not posting a ton of stuff on there. My kids be helping me with that a lot. I ain’t going to lie. I got a 14-year-old, a 12-year-old, a 10-year-old, and an eight-year-old. I’m in the trenches, bro. I was saying “6-7” before anybody. Check the stats. I was hitting the 41 before anybody, bro. I was doing all of that before it was burnt. Now it’s burnt. You know what I mean? We onto other things. But yeah, nah, man. It’s goofy, but they keep me in tune with everything that they’re into because I’m Dad, you know? They keep me abreast of what’s going on. My love for Playboi Carti comes from my oldest son.

You’re from the Bronx. Take me back to the beginning of your comedy career.
The beginning of it unofficially was at seven or eight years old because I would be in a room like this — not this fancy, you know what I’m saying? The furniture was covered in plastic, and it was a lot more Dominicans around. But family gatherings and things like that, my pops would call me out and be like, “Yo, papi, hey, tell him how Uncle Diego acted when he’s drunk.” So then I’d do impression of my uncle drunk. And bro, it’s grown-ass men in the room, dying laughing, like, “A, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah. This little motherfucker. Oh, that boy good.” You know what I’m saying? That type of energy. So I was like, “Oh yeah.” I was like, “Y’all don’t listen to me any other time. But right now I got command of this room.” You know what I’m saying? I was like, “If you make people laugh, man, if you make people smile, be happy, enjoy themselves, that’s powerful.”

How did Victory Light start?
I started writing Victory Light, the blog, back in the day on Blogspot. I was working first as a teacher’s assistant in the Bronx, in the junior high school that I went to. So I was making like $23,000 a year. I wasn’t making shit. I was broke. My girl was making three times what I was making. So my masculinity was being challenged. You know what I’m saying? I’m like, “Yo.” We at the supermarket and she’s telling me to put shit down, like I’m a kid. “Put the Cocoa Pebbles down. We getting the Dyno-Bites.”

So I just kept going with Victory Light, just pumping, pumping, pumping. It was cathartic, you know what I’m saying? It wasn’t even like, “Yo, I’m trying to make something with this.” It was just like, “Yo, let me get my shit off.” So I would end [each post] with like, “Yo, fuck all of y’all. If you’re reading this, fuck all of y’all. I’m still broke. You ain’t helping me. Reading this? Thank you, I guess, whatever.” But then it ended up being that the right people were reading it.

How did Twitter factor in early on?
So this is like 2007, so then ’08, ’09, Twitter comes along. And my homegirl Crystal was like, “Yo, this is like tailor made for you, bro. I know that you don’t know what ADHD is, but you definitely got it. And yo, you just firing off one-liners, and jokes, and like non-sequiturs, this shit is made for you.” So I was like, “All right, cool.” So I get on it, I’m on my flip phone texting 40404. So I was doing that, and I used it mostly to just be like, “Yo, new Victory Light post is up.” And then just like observational shit.

They used to have like a GPS feature where you could see people around you, so like Bronx Twitter, Brooklyn Twitter, that was like a thing. So you would hashtag Bronx Twitter, and talk to people in the Bronx about what’s going on. So I was just cutting ass up there, just joking, doing my thing.

So you were at Complex first. Then, how did the VICE show start?
Right. 2015, ’16, I get my sea legs. I was at MTV before. And to me, that was like community college for TV. Like, “Learn how to do TV, learn how to open up to camera, learn how to pace yourself, read from a prompter without sounding like … Make it sound natural.”

Reading the prompter, ad libbing, and then going back to that script is hard as hell, man. So I learned all of that stuff, then took all of that and went to VICE, and I was just like, “Yo, I’m ready to cook.” Started around 2016, right around the time of the presidential election. Talk about getting thrown into the fire. It was like, “Yo, listen, your first mission at Viceland is a live election broadcast.”

What was that first VICE election night like?
I pulled up that day. I had to drive my ’05 Honda Accord, you know what I mean? Parked that myself and then get up there. And then I was like, “Goddamn.” I was like, “They got mad trailers outside. Oh, this is live TV shit.” Mad wires and everything. I was like, “OK, bet.” I went on and did that. After that, I was like, “Yo, y’all be complaining a lot, bro. That shit was light work.”

You had Cardi B and Jim Jones on the air that night. What happens when Trump gets announced as the winner?
Everybody, yo, Cardi B’s like, “Yo, I don’t know what we going to do, because the strippers… I don’t know. The drug dealers be paying the strippers. I don’t know what’s going on.” She was like, “I’m concerned.” There was an air of like, “Yo, hold on, son, what is going on?” This is not supposed to happen. This is supposed to be a lay-up for the lady whose last name is the same as the former president. And then they had some dude downstairs that was like the Steve Kornacki of VICE, I guess, and was just coloring in a map with a crayon, like red and blue. And when he held up that map and that shit was like red, red, red, red, red, red, I was like, “All right, we about to see.” You know what I mean? Because I’m Dominican, bro. I’ve seen civil unrest. So I was like, “Yo, whoo. America, y’all about to get a little taste.”

For you and Desus, what was that like, just being able to just do whatever and experiment on TV?
Bro, it was so fire because… there was a moment where Ted Cruz got caught favoriting porno shit [on Twitter]. And we were like, “Yo, what kind of pino is Ted Cruz watching?” So we literally were like, “Yo… we watching the Ted Cruz pino. And we’re going to watch porn on TV and critique it in real time.” I was like, “Ain’t no way…” Coming from Viacom? “Ain’t no way we would’ve did this at MTV.” It was phenomenal, bro.

You and Desus split a few years after that. What was it like to end such a big creative partnership?
2022 was the split-split. But yeah, no, I was very focused on a certain area, you know what I’m saying, where you see an opportunity to really cook. I wanted to attack that. And I’m like, “This is where I’m going. You going? You coming? If you’re not coming, I’m going. You know what I’m saying? Because this is what needs to be done for sustained success.” Because I’m like, “Yo, I’m thinking different.”

I’m not a single guy. I got four kids, I had a mortgage and shit. I had just moved to Jersey because I was like, “Four kids don’t fit in the two-bedroom.” You know what I mean? So I was like, “OK.” I was like, “Every time I open my closet, a Pyrex falls on my head.” So I was like, “All right, we got to bust a move.” I was very committed to the idea of longevity in entertainment, and not just being like a flash in a pan, like some weird crypto meme coin. I’m like, “I’m trying to be out here like a gold bar, bro, just forever.”

So how does it work — going from internet to TV to podcast to radio?
Bro, shit is cyclical, you know what I’m saying? When I was doing podcasting, the first go around, it was like, “All right, this is new… you can only get this on an iPhone.” And now it’s like, “Bro, everybody and they mother got a podcast.” So it’s just like, “All right, what do motherfuckers not…?” That’s me, like Max B: “Yo, y’all go this way, I go up.” And what are people not doing? Terrestrial radio. Boom. Let me get in there and shake shit up.

Maybe it’s a New York thing. Now I feel like every new, funny streamer is a kid from the Bronx.
Dog, we got the sauce. I’ve been trying to tell people for the longest time, bro. It’s like the forgotten borough. There’s 30 Meros up there. You know what I’m saying? I just got out early. You know what I mean? I got out early. I was like, “I could write.” You know what I mean? That was my main thing.

What is it like now, with Mamdani as mayor? How are you feeling about the city?
I love it because he came in and in eight days he had UPK [Universal Pre-Kindergarten] on and popping… I’m doing it for the Mero of 10, 15 years ago. If [former mayor Bill] de Blasio didn’t have UPK, I would’ve been fried. I moved to Jersey because that shit ended. I couldn’t afford it!

If you got a regular job… My parents bought a house in the Bronx. My mom’s a public school teacher, my pa’s a HVAC technician. None of them come from money. There was no windfall of cash, you know what I’m saying? They’re nothing like that. So I’m like, “We need that to be a reality for New Yorkers.” If you teach at P.S. 86 and you want to live around the corner from your job, you should be able to. You know?

Do you feel politically activated on the air? Do you want to start speaking out about this stuff?
Speaking out sometimes will cost you money, but I don’t give a fuck. My pops — shout out to my pops, Tito, Big T — he’s very pro-socialism. He used to be like, “Papi, be careful what you saying… I come here to the United States so that you can have a good future for yourself and for my grandchildren. Don’t fuck that shit up by saying that we have a painting of Ayatollah Khomeini in the living room.” And I was like, “OK.”

How do you balance “post-woke culture”?
My thing is just like, I wouldn’t even consider myself woke, or not woke, or label myself as anything. I’m like, “Bro, I’m just the guy that exists in the world, and I want you to have the same shit that I got… I don’t [care] what you are. You could be trans, you could be gay, you could be Black, Asian, whatever the fuck you are, bro. Be you. I’m going to be me. Let’s just make sure that we all get the same shit… Also, I don’t [care] about what you got going on. I’m a New Yorker. I mind my business.”

Don’t get me on my soapbox. But shit like the Riley Gaines shit … I’m like, “Bro, this is a grift, shorty. You suck. You came in fifth. You know what I mean? You didn’t lose because there was a transgender athlete in this swim meet. You lost because you were ass. So fight against being ass. Get back in the lab, fix your shit up, and stop blaming this shit on another people, a marginalized community that got nothing to do with you.” That’s my thing. And I learned from my pops. From my parents being like, “Yo, treat people how you want to be treated. Don’t be a piece of shit.” Like, wow. What a concept. Don’t be a piece of garbage human being and things will be OK.

So thinking about Hot 97 in 2026, what are the big themes that you’re looking at?
Everything that people are doing now digitally is stuff that comes from older media .. [It’s about] bringing back some of that in a fresh, modern way. You know that Jadakiss freestyle that you love, back in the day? This is where he spit it first. Or “put your hand in the register”? I’m trying to have multiple moments like that in my tenure at Hot 97. It’s about creating New York radio moments that resonate.