By Christopher Sloce
But the one thing that was still there: He was motivated by fame…Fame is quite an ugly thing to me, and most people would be scared to death of it, but he was driven by it. He talked about it in ways that didn't even make sense to me. He relished it.
He loved when we went somewhere to eat and somebody recognized him. He had this whole reward system in his head that didn't exist in other people's heads: When people recognize you and want a piece of you, it was the equivalent of being wealthy. He just ate it up.
—Bob Ebeling, engineer and drummer for Kid Rock, from “Kid Rock before the fame: The definitive Detroit oral history”
I'M GOING PLATINUM
He was named Robert Ritchie. He was called Kid Rock. He had been dropped from Jive after his debut Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast only garnered local radio play and infamy for dunderheaded sex rhymes. A problem was apparent: besides his bonafides in the early hip-hop scene, wherein he taught himself to produce, rap, and DJ, his career was stuck in Detroit. Simply put: he was not that great at making hip-hop. He tried to fuse the Beastie Boys with LL Cool J, but managed to lower the IQ on the early Beastie’s nasal frat antics to room temp; coming across as gross and obnoxious. But he remained a local success, and in 1993 he began finding himself. It started on the Fire It Up EP. And when he found himself, he found the future.
Fire It Up has two songs, each notable for different reasons. The first is “I Am the Bullgod”, which is a Monster Magnet tribute with rapped verses. It sounds like rap-rock Alice in Chains. I have never listened to Dirt and ached for Layne Staley to kick a sixteen.
More important was the b-side, “A Country Boy Can Survive”. It’s easy to remember Hank Williams, Jr as the “are you ready for some football guy who hates Obama”, but Hank Williams Jr became the voice of Monday Night NFL broadcasts because he dominated 80s country charts; bridging the divides between Urban Cowboy country and 70s outlaw traditionality. Every Hank Williams Jr album from 1979 to 1992 went gold or platinum, buoyed by his honky-tonk and blues influenced songwriting and archetypally perfect country music voice.
While songs like “The American Dream” take imperfect but legible aim at the distance between America’s promise and reality, Hank’s songwriting twisted country’s distrust of the city into something like an ethos. It’s not enough that “heaven must be a lot like Dixie”, the distance between Hell and New York is no distance at all. Hank Jr’s Divine Comedy, however, is “A Country Boy Can Survive”.
“A Country Boy Can Survive” is both an anthem of rugged country self-reliance and a parable where Bernie Goetz wears a horseshoe belt buckle. After endless examples of all the good things about country life, flora and fauna and freedom, the penultimate verse tells the story of his friend, a businessman, who gets murdered in the city over $43 dollars. The song froths into a reactionary fantasia: the mugger is shot with a .45, his body is desecrated, Beech-Nut tobacco “spit in his eyes”. The song then repeats one of its refrains, the implications made all the more sinister: a country boy can “skin a buck”, a buck being a traditional term for a black American male slave as well as a male deer.
Naturally, this is the song Kid Rock covered. Not even a country boy himself, it’s just as likely he covered it because it was popular and he loved Hank as it is likely he thought through any of the implications of covering it. If anything, his cover feels like a psychic passing of the torch, one neither could imagine. After all, Kid Rock had a flat-top and a child with a black woman, and had spent years making music in a genre that exemplified urban violence and unrest to angry people, resentful in their hinterland homes.
Before he covered “Country Boy”, it seemed like Kid Rock had made an attempt to write something similar, all the way back in the Grits days: “New York’s Not My Home”. Kid Rock crosses his Hank Williams, Jr urges with LL Cool J’s California picaresque “Going Back to Cali”. Rather than crime, what raises Kid Rock’s animus is open displays of sexuality (and Big Macs costing over $2.50). Seeing a trans woman, he thinks, “[She’d] get dissed in Detroit, but I’ll leave it alone”. That was hip-hop, however. His version of “A Country Boy” was another turgid stab at grunge, a genre already not known for being light on its feet. Kid Rock is not Layne Staley the same way he’s not Hank Jr. or LL Cool J. Instead, Kid Rock was beginning to craft a fantasy that you could be all three, though “Bull God”. And in order to do it, there was one missing element: a band.
An antecedent for Rock was the Howlin' Diablos, a Detroit area act that combined elements of rock and soul into one big party mix, even inviting Kid Rock to rap with them live. Kid Rock began constructing a new on-stage persona a white “player” wearing a fedora and big white fur coats with a possibly loaded gun shoved into his pants, inspired by the Howlin’ Diablos front man Tino Gross. A less discussed link may be the work of Dr. John.
Kid Rock's manager gave him a tape of Dr. John's early 70s live shows, where, under the influence of Harold Baptiste, Dr. John conjured up something stranger than music fit for the Bourbon Street section of Disney. The show featured little people intended to add to the carnivalesque air. Once Rock met Joe C, a rapper made diminutive due to the ravages of celiac disease, he had his carnival. (Joe C passed in the late 2000s).
It’s also true that in 1996, Kid Rock’s hip-hop cred was nonexistent. In Detroit, nobody was checking for Kid Rock as a rapper. With his rap reputation at an all-time low, he would have to find other venues for his work. While paying his band members would lower the take-home for Rock, putting together a band allowed Rock to play bars that weren’t friendly to hip-hop. With this change of method came a change of fortunes in his audience, which changed from pure hip-hop to something else. “You'd have 900 people in the room — all these little white kids who dropped acid and liked listening to gangsta rap,” according to Uncle Kracker.
There’s also the fact is being a white rapper was harder at that any point in history inside the hip-hop subculture. Hip-hop is fiercely competitive. While someone like MC Serch from 3rd Bass has an inarguable role in hip-hop history, helping break artists like MF Doom and Nas, by the mid 90s, artists like Vanilla Ice and Snow were jokes. House of Pain, no matter how many times you hear “Jump Around”, was essentially a one hit wonder. The Beastie Boys remain an exception, and there examples in the underground we can point to (El-P’s Company Flow released the Funcrusher EP in 1995). But Kid Rock was in a difficult space: too hip-hop for the rock world, not hip-hop enough for the underground. Putting together a band and leaning into his rock influences were necessary for survival.
Twisted Brown Trucker, Kid Rock’s backing band, made their debut on Early Mornin’ Stoned Pimp, best approached as a prototype. Kid Rock’s lawyer, Tommy Valentino, met with labels and worked to get Kid Rock signed. Kid Rock was marketable to anyone willing to see the future for just a moment, but most people weren’t. Local labels told them they weren’t interested in white rappers. The response from Valentino: "He's not a white rapper. He's a rock star and everything in between."
The “proof”, as it were, came on Devil Without a Cause, released on Lava Records, in partnership with Atlantic Records. His band was road-tested and he was benefitting from a change in how rapping was perceived. Nu-metal was in its prime n 1999. Nu-metal was likely the first moment where, for rock listeners, rapping was understood as a vocal technique. Nu-metal, at its heart, was about a pure expression of catharsis by whatever means were available. Jonathan Davis from Korn was just as happy to beatbox as he was to cry on a song. As rao has always included a space for people who may not be technical masters but can get a point across nu-metal was a free space for people who weren’t traditional rappers yet loved the music.
With technical mastery and flow less emphasized, Kid Rock found a space where his mediocre rapping would not be an impediment to his musical goals. Nu-metal found its audience in disaffected kids, angry at pretty much everything you gave them (like most rock music). In addition, while nu-metal is less homogenous than often presented, plenty of its fans weren’t as interested in whether or not a white person could rap well enough as long as he stayed on beat. And as nu-metal was about angst, all angst needs a positive outlet. It needed a party Kid Rock could provide.
Throughout this project, as I’ve done my best to understand Kid Rock’s music, I’ve had a refrain to everybody when I explain what I’m doing: I like one Kid Rock song, three if I’m drunk (and I don’t get drunk anymore). They’re all on this album. I know I’m writing music criticism here, but I have no real explanation for why I like "Bawitdaba" other than it just goes crazy stupid and bangs enough I forget it’s Kid Rock even though the song builds up in a way Kid Rock has never been able to replicate since, radio static and caveman riffing until he screams “My name is Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid Rooooooock!” and then it launches an the iconic verse that’s a dedication to all the lowlifes, dirtbags, and outlaws listening to this song, which includes you. The chorus is a bunch of doggerel, but the effect is undeniable. You could pretty easily see this guy as the biggest rock star on the planet based on the first minute of this song.
Less discussed in Kid Rock’s cowboy cosplay is how much of it comes from the work of the Beastie Boys, already an obvious early inspiration. “Paul Revere” casts the trio as a gang of prankish outlaws. Paul’s Boutique’s “High Plains Drifter” is its revisionist western equivalent, Unforgiven to “Paul Revere” as Rio Bravo. “Cowboy” is often not read in this context but as part of Kid Rock’s myth-making: he started in Detroit and went to LA to become a rock-star/rapper/pimp. It’s also a song about wanting fame. Kid Rock doesn’t tell you he’s a cowboy, he wants to be one, and the only way to do so is to strike out for the territories like Huckleberry Finn.
The most surprising hit on Devil Without a Cause was “Only God Knows Why” a power ballad Kid Rock wrote about the weary facts of road life, scratching the Bob Seeger itch. It contains the only possibly innovative moment in his catalogue: the song is sang entirely through auto-tune, less for pitch correction and more for the warbling effect it puts on the vocal. The question remains if this song would be anything beyond a stock country ballad if not for the sonic manipulation, but sonic manipulation is part of why music is interesting. This song was the first time Kid Rock showed off his balladic side and his only successful one (at least if I’m drunk).
These are all legible hits, and they are what made Kid Rock popular, but none of these songs tell you about the man under the fedora. That song is “Black Chick, White Guy”. It was not the first time he had recorded this song: an original version closed out Early Mornin’ Stoned Pimp. Looking at the credits for Devil are telling: Rock’s biggest hits include a gang of cowriters, including Uncle Kracker and producers for the album. “Black Chick” is written by one writer: Kid Rock himself. Kid Rock had recorded several naked psychodramas in his early career. “My Oedipus Complex” is about what it sounds like, shouting at his dad for never supporting him or understanding his dreams.
The “White Guy” is Kid Rock; the “Black Chick” is his high school sweetheart and the mother of his children. There’s a misconception about storytelling that facts are the story. In that event, Ulysses is about two guys walking around, and it’s not. The story is the presentation of facts. A lot of what is alleged through “Black Chick, White Guy” is messy: Kid Rock’s high school sweetheart, with whom he had a child in 1993, got pregnant during a period they weren’t together and told Rock the child was his. Kid Rock raised the two with his girlfriend until he realized his “daughter” was her partner’s from the other relationship. They split and Kid Rock took custody of his son Robert James Ritchie, Jr.
What’s relayed is a sort of dust-born rambler’s tale, a story of luck and woe. It’s also framed as a somewhat universal: “But either way, here's one tale/of two like that and what prevailed.” Interracial relationships are presented as riddles: “Black chick, white guy, does it mean shit, maybe?” Kid Rock is an American suburban Romeo meeting the black Juliet in Capulet turf. And what comes with that territory is a picture of a broken black family: a drunk and promiscuous mother, “three different kids by three different men” who treats her daughter “more like a friend”.
The fate of Kid Rock’s girlfriend recalls, more than anything, is “A Country Boy Can Survive”: someone goes to the city, deals with the (Black) environs, and comes away worse. In the city (a city Kid Rock has been happy to claim throughout his career), his ex is preyed upon because she’s a “pretty girl” with a “white accent”. Her next partner is a drug dealer; we know he’s black because Kid Rock says the exact word you wouldn’t want him to. The only thing, according to the ex, that will fix her: children. Kid Rock laments that history has repeated itself. His ex has repeated the vicious cycle once again: “three different kids by three different men”.
Things happen, certainly, in relationships between all people of all colors, but the song’s view of interracial relationships as a Gordian knot only straight talk can untangle leads into a trap that there’s no eye for sensitivity for what led to those choices. There's a much bigger issue at hand: this is a song that is pointed as archetypal, Black chick and white guy in an eternal dance, and only one archetype is a stereotype. Every Black woman in this song is presented as a Jezebel with their brain in their ovaries, duplicitous to every man they see, promiscuous as an innate fact instead of as a chosen preference (a preference Rock certainly doesn’t judge in himself). On the album that helped him ascend to stardom, he spends seven minutes rerecording a song about how he was fucked over by his ex, no metaphors or plausible deniability. Even if it’s true: she’s just a black woman from Detroit. She is not famous, even locally, and if she were it’d be as “Kid Rock’s ex”. But Kid Rock was signalling what audience he was more concerned with having, and it’s on a diamond selling album.
In the early days (when he had “20,000 people hip-hopping on the floor”) Kid Rock had to get some buy-in from the largely black hip-hop community. Whatever he did, it was enough to get D-Nice from Boogie Down Productions and Too $hort as boosters, as well as the countless anonymous promoters, b-boys, DJs, and rappers in Detroit. He managed to get signed to Jive and tour with Ice Cube. As it became apparent Kid Rock was a middling rapper, his music had to change in order for him to survive and reach his goal: being famous. Going from rapping over a DJ with turntables over a microphone to having a band behind him was a decision to also expand his audience. Uncle Kracker admits as much: “He figured out he could start playing bars in other cities if he had an actual backup band too. Nobody was going to book him with just the track thing behind him.” It’s worth wondering what kind of bars were putting up rules to keep hip-hop acts from playing; whether or not it’s a sonic version of infamous bar “dress codes” (something several Detroit establishments have had over the years). “Black Chick, White Guy” was a sign as well: the people who helped Kid Rock get the skills to become a rapper, “a rock star, and everything in between” were no longer as important to the Kid Rock project. In that way, it might be the most racist song ever released on a multi-platinum album. And that album is why you are willing to read this.
WE’RE AN AMERICAN BAND
What are the right reasons to open an escort service?
Awww. That’s just a silly line. There’s no deep thought process behind it. To get paid. To make money. Isn’t that what everything is the right reason for?
—Kid Rock, “The Low Times and High Life of Kid Rock”
Kid Rock made his first Rolling Stone cover in June of 2000, wearing an American flag colored fedora and a pop tab vest over a Pabst Blue Ribbon belt buckle. The feature focuses on his and Twisted Brown Trucker’s trip to Jamaica to play a show “partly organized, as it happens, by Rolling Stone”. The piece sets out to have Kid Rock be understood by a general audience, and mostly succeeds, hitting all the pertinent biographical info, including a revelation that Kid Rock’s ex sued both him and Rolling Stone for discussing their relationship, also being discussed on an album that sold ten million copies. (Heath 00)
It’s easy to ignore amongst all the standard “new star” profile details, but special attention should be paid to the covers selected by the band, allowing Kid Rock to give out samplers of his coming country-fried good time rock (or country-fried good time country). While in Jamaica, Kid Rock regales spring breakers with a cover of “What I Got” by Sublime," as well as a medley of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”and Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band”. The most interesting song covered, by far, is David Allan Coe’s “Son of the South”. (Heath 00).
“Son” was written by David Allan Coe with help from southern rock founding father Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band. The chorus of the song sees David Allan Coe declaring himself a “redneck, rock ‘n’ roll son of the south” who doesn’t like any of the “new wave disco bands around”. “Son” as a song, is a postmodern collection of signifiers for those versed in AOR radio. The first verse is a list of what bands David Allan Coe likes, all to counteract a balance between “new wave/disco”: Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, the Allmans, Hank Jr. The “redneck” persona is not considering the Allman Brothers as a prominent multi-racial group or ZZ Top’s fairly novel engagements with new wave in expressing his preference for rock ‘n’ roll. The acidic response to new wave and disco were largely a recognition of the strong queer and black roots inherent in the genres, all over a greasy “La Grange” riff, itself based on John Lee Hooker’s“Boogie Chillun” rhythm. This pattern of referencing better music is a tradition that Kid Rock would continue on.
The hipster interest in David Allan Coe tends to reside in how the “long-haired redneck” reinvented transgression from his own “outlaw” principles. David Allan Coe’s most infamous recordings, the duology of “biker” albums Nothing Sacred and Underground Album, were comedy albums where the jokes weren’t different from the racist comics in WAR. The Coe album including “Son of the South” includes him holding his daughter with a Confederate Flag draped over his shoulder. Just as Kid Rock’s early rapping was besotted with the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J, his country pose is essentially Diet Coe/Hank Jr. Whatever we want to say about how David Allan Coe is an “outlaw”, he did do a considerable amount of jail time. The most time Kid Rock ever did was in a bar fight after he got signed.
The Kid Rock project did something similar to what Broadway singing hopeful Jim Goad did for the “redneck” in the eyes of a white alt crowd of zine-readers including Vice magazine and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. Kid Rock’s crowd was less Hipster Runoff and more Blue Collar Comedy Tour, but it brought a similar (if less outwardly transgressive) energy. Rednecks all, but playing to different white biases: the hipster gawks at the redneck and lusts for his authenticity, and the redneck at home sees Kid Rock and thinks it’s him. The redneck conveniently came back when a jingoistic beliefs were useful in garnering support for our post 9/11 Middle East entanglements. The redneck didn’t ask questions about why we were there and couldn’t tell you the “difference between Iraq and Iran”, as Alan Jackson sang. He wanted to drink beer, and if terrorists got in the way, his answer was “Let’s roll.” This country had no interest in making conditions better for the redneck, just using him to make conditions better for themselves. Goad, the Blue Collar comics (themselves just copying The Kings of Comedy model), and Rock are mascots; signifiers of something rather than the signified itself.
Kid Rock’s 2001 album Cocky, there was less emphasis on rap-rock, the disco and new wave of its time. Some of this has to do with Rock’s ambivalence to the now-fading nu-metal trend and some of this has to do with the chasing of his own muse, but it opened up new opportunities for Rock. There are rap-rock songs on Cocky, but there is a conscious move towards an arena ready heartland rock. “You Never Met a Motherfucker Quite Like Me” takes the “Son of the South” tact, to tell you how fame has allowed him to meet a list of heroes: Hank Jr, Billy Gibbons, Willie Nelson, Ahmet Ertegun (the founder of Atlantic Records, who he claims “educated him on jazz”; draw your own conclusions if Ertegun sat down Rock with an Rashaan Ronald Kirk album).
“Picture”, however, was the album’s biggest hit and surprise. Originally a duet with Allison Morer, the most well-known version features Sheryl Crow. “Picture” is a portrait of two lovers: the cocaine snorting, whiskey swilling Rock missing the saintly church going, wine-drinking Crow, missing him back. A straight-forward country song, it builds into a big rock explosion in the third verse when Crow and Kid Rock swap off singing, two ships in the night. The emotional climax of the song is Sheryl Crow, heartbroken she can’t keep Kid Rock from avoiding mossy growths, “going to church”. Meanwhile, Kid Rock is “off to drink her away”. He sings this with a level of unearned arena rock abandon, baying like a cartoon hound dog.
Rock and Crow act as the spectres of a specific Apollonian and Dionysian conflict at the center of a certain Protestantism: Friday or Saturday night debauchery versus Sunday morning piety. The sinner who can acknowledge something needs to change is always given more credit in the faith than the quietly dedicated, especially when it’s a man who loves the pleasures of the world versus a woman who is just doing what she’s expected (be quiet and love the Lord). In essence, it’s an interrupted conversion: that Kid Rock could possibly one day accompany Crow to church is more exciting than Crow’s dedication to showing up every Sunday.
“Picture” was a coup for Kid Rock in a chase for legitimacy. In 2015 he spoke to Rolling Stone again: “I was like, ‘This has gotta work.’ So what’s popular? Korn. I knew I can do that shit in my sleep. But let me throw in ‘Only God Knows Why’ and ‘Cowboy’ so I can have a career.” “Picture” is about having a career. This song put Kid Rock in places he wouldn’t have expected, like the Adult Contemporary and Country charts.
The coming years weren’t fallow but mostly consisted of Kid Rock coasting, living a rock star life and letting you know it. Nothing says “coasting” like your next album being both a self-titled and the lead single being a cover of Bad Company’s soppy “Feel Like Makin’ Love”. Much of Kid Rock is about continuing the reputation of him as a country-fried rock ‘n’ roll star. The country chart success of “Picture” gave him not only new fans, but told country musicians that Rock could help them crossover to his audience as well, with “Cold and Empty” features a Kenny Chesney co-writing credit. Rapping was at an all time minimum for Rock.
But Kid Rock loved being famous, and the goal was complete. All he had to do, every couple of years, was to make an album at his own leisure. The brass ring was firmly in his hand; he put a diamond one on Pamela Anderson’s finger and didn’t release any new music until 2007 when Rock ‘n’ Roll Jesus came out and Pamela was gone. Though Rock kept Jesus out of the Apple Store due to a royalties dispute, it’s ironic that it probably benefited him. Rock is a singles artist and his biggest single was to come. No song could define him more.
“All Summer Long” is an apt description of how long it was on the radio, and even that undersells it. Large hits for artists are either encapsulations of commercial appeal or aberrations but in Rock’s case it is the skeleton key for his appeal because of its construction. The song jams together Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Sweet Home Alabama” with Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”. Most mash-up artists put together artists and nudge you, asking “DO YOU GET IT?” but there was nothing to get here other than vague fuzzies about aging. Kid Rock put together two iconic rock songs and sang a nostalgic ditty about “trying different things and smoking funny things”. The result is a song about youthful hedonism from the safest viewpoint on the planet, which is being older and trying to talk to other Gen Xers about how you used to drink from the hose. No matter how much Budweiser is implied to be drank and how much dirt weed is implied to be burnt, it has the same effect as that online art where somebody draws Calvin as Han Solo and Hobbes as Chewbacca.
We can understand the song a little better by understanding its constituent parts. “Werewolves of London” became Zevon’s signature song and hit mostly by accident. Zevon’s career is full of songs about odd characters and unseemly situations; “Werewolves” is just a viable packaging of what makes Zevon special, a sense of wildness most singer songwriters don’t touch. Case in point: the superior live version on Zevon’s Stand in the Fire, one of the four or five best live rock albums ever recorded, includes a section about Zevon seeing a werewolf buying a convertible to go down to Tijuana to “kill someone on film or something”.
More important is “Sweet Home Alabama”, considered the Southern national anthem for good and ill. Like the region it represents, it is a mess of contradictions; good impulses and bad. Progressive southern essay writers like to write about these sorts of contradictions, but the problem is pretty simple. There are scores of good people in the South and scores of bad, but the region’s power structures have never escaped the counter-Reconstruction, and attempts to reconcile this fact are embarrassing, mawkish, and deluded. “Sweet Home Alabama” becomes a battleground for this very tension. While I have no idea if Ronnie Van Zandt had good or bad politics in his heart of hearts, the song’s messy semiotics have made it a culture war cudgel, and not always in a flattering direction. Neil Young is treated as some sort of unwelcome interlocutor for pointing out the prevalence of racism in the South in songs like “Southern Man” and “Alabama”. “Sweet Home” responds by telling him “a southern man doesn’t need him around anyhow”. Whether or not the back-up singers are singing “ooh, ooh, ooh” after the line “in Birmingham they love the governor” or booing him using Watergate to get around the fact the governor of Alabama ran for President as a segregationist diverts from who George Wallace really was. Telling people who point out the intense racism in the south that they’re not welcome is not much different than the talk of “outside agitators”; the reframing of the conversation always ignores that the blackest region of the country is the region of Jim Crow. What is often excused as ignorance in Southern people is actually moral cowardice laundered through a "jes folks" perspective, a perspective Kid Rock has always been happy to pretend applies to him. (He eventually offered something of a mea culpa for flying the Flag when accepting a NAACP lifetime achievement award; a few years later when protested again, he asked the protestors to kiss his ass).
“All Summer Young” isn’t a song about losing yourself in a mosh pit like “Bawitdaba” or a puckish go west young narrative like “Cowboy”. This is a song about the past, a past Kid Rock was always looked to. As he became more of a feature of the past, recalling it kept him alive and famous. There is nothing that connects “Werewolves” and “Alabama” but the key of D and popularity. Their mash-up, like many mash-ups, can only serve to wink at itself. But its curious construction parallels the willing fantasies created in service of conservative narratives, and it’s a narrative that abounded on Ipods and at barbecues. To go back to Zevon, his southern rock parody “Play It All Night Long” is a smart-assed rejoinder to the self-pity of those who embody stoic self-reliance and bourgeois entitlement, depending on whatever’s convenient. “Sweet Home Alabama”, he sings. “Play that dead band’s song.” Kid Rock was happy to, and that’s why you didn’t hear about his music after this album, except to laugh at it. With you out of the picture, Kid Rock had to play to another crowd.
If I Was President
“I feel ashamed and dirty for even looking at his songs. If this sex-crazed animal, whose favorite word is the F-word, is allowed to sing at Bush's inauguration this will send a clear message to pro-family Americans that the Republican Party has taken them for a ride and ditched them in the gutter."- Randy Thomasson, President of Campaign for Children and Families, to WorldNetDaily.com, recovered by Blabbermouth“You want me to get political? Well, this is about as deep as Kid Rock thinks: Monica Lewinsky is a fuckin’ ho, and Bill Clinton is a goddamned pimp!”
—Kid Rock intro to “Balls in Your Mouth” at Woodstock ‘99
It was 2005, and it was time to celebrate the victory of George W. Bush. The “America's Future Rocks Today” was a teen-oriented inaugural concert. The lineup was Jojo, Hillary Duff, 3 Doors Down, and Fuel. A request by the Bush Twins was not filled. "The two Bush girls requested Kid Rock — they love him. He's hot, and he's young. But nobody at the (inaugural) committee ever sat down and listened to his albums." George Schlatter said. After some cries of betrayal by the then dominant family values wing of the party, like Thomasson the rumor was quelled. A party animal like Kid Rock knows you can never be too late for a party, but you can always be too early. The Republicans would have to catch up to Kid Rock.
When people cared to ask Kid Rock how he felt about politics, he called himself a libertarian, an accurate read up to a point. In 2003 he was gung-ho for the Iraq War: "We got to kill that motherfucker Saddam. Slit his throat. Kill him and the guy in North Korea.” An interviewer followed up, asking “Are some women and children going to die?” "Yeah. But is [sic] doing the right thing. You got money, you sit around talking about peace. People who don't have money need some help." Kid Rock has always presented himself as a maverick, and his libertarianism would be one version of that. Yet it somehow circled back into the mainstream Republican positions of the time, when that was the path of least resistance. Part of the initial allure of libertarianism was its ability to remain conservative while ceding a few progressive points, ultimately as motte and baileys for more substantive philosophical points in libertarianism. The Iraq War would be one of these points; Rock pretended to break with orthodoxy only to serve it. (The attraction of libertarianism for a lot of people is telling the powers that be to leave you alone. The problem is sooner or later some libertarians realize they can boss people around).
Most of Kid Rock’s support of politicians up until 2012 were chalk, supporting the winners. He called the election of Barack Obama “a great thing for black people”. This is until 2012, when he endorsed Republicans Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. His political views had been fairly obvious throughout his career. But even in breaking orthodoxy, there was only so far he was willing to go. His official feelings, even with Romney and Ryan losing, was that there were no hard feelings.
There’s a certain point in mainstream stardom that you’re a celebrity for life, even if your music isn’t as big as it once was. Every pop girlie on the planet has made fun of Katy Perry’s last few albums, but she’s still dating Justin Trudeau and she’ll still get the invites to do legacy performances at the Grammys. But she’s irrelevant. Kid Rock may have always wanted to record heartland rock, but it didn’t light the world on fire. His album after Rock ‘n’ Roll Jesus was a country album called Born Free, and he’s stayed in the lane paved by his mid-career pivot, a pivot towards music that hearkens towards traditional forms to celebrate them in their most ossified form. A lot of roots music does operate in this mode, but it attempts to preserve a past that’s endangered and acts to ground the idea of a country’s identity. Kid Rock is making folk music of a kind, hearkening to a post WWII radio explosion. Like many things in conservatism, this status is accepted as a historical given; to explicate it further is treason. In Rock’s case, copying his record collection has always been about as good as he can get, but he tailors his copies to his audience. Given his own beliefs , and the more openly combative forms of conservatism that were being embraced, Rock was a natural fit for a Tea Party America. His audience’s politics and his were only going to get more intertwined. As Thomas Valentino, his now former lawyer said in a 2025 Rolling Stone interview:
This is a guy who has always had his pulse on who his audience is. Right now, he recognizes 90 percent of the people who come to his shows are buying into what he’s doing and saying politically. He also leans that way, but he’s a smart business guy. If he thinks he’s going to make money taking a certain position, then I think a lot of those things are driven by business.
“Business” isn’t the only explanation, though. Hunter S. Thompson said upon the election of Richard Nixon that America was “just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”. Richard Nixon was a resentful California Quaker from modest roots, but Donald Trump represents the two hundred million used car salesmen, one of who is Kid Rock’s dad. The election of Donald Trump allowed him to go home, spiritually, to the place he always wanted to leave: the suburbs, where now big trucks and pretending to be a redneck have replaced polos. In “New York Is Not My Home”, he claims Detroit to be his home, and always has. But it’s Romeo, Michigan, where his heart truly resides: in the home of his car salesman father. Whatever inspiration his music had is now as inspired as opening another car lot. But he hasn’t gotten less famous. Instead, he changed his celebrity status to reflect something else. It just so happens two hundred million car salesmen agree.
The edict of Trump America is “I have more money, therefore I’m better than you”, but there is also the preening nastiness, the need to dominate, the desire to make sure your lessers know they’re lesser. It’s a perfect time to be a celebrity for that reason: after winning everything, you are being given more and more because you deserve it just for being already on third base. At that point, the music doesn’t even matter. I would challenge anyone who has no investment in Kid Rock’s music other than knowing it exists, like they know plenty of other pop musicians to name one song Kid Rock has put out in the last few years that isn’t related to his status as one of the official musicians of Trumpism.
It’s that mediocrity combined with achieved status more than anything that makes him the most influential conservative artist of our time. Forget Michel Houellebecq, Bryan Ferry, Morrissey, Whit Stillman, the ketamine hoovers of Dimes Square and the Red Scare girls, all the Thielbucks and Yarvindollars wasted on art school persiflage. All their midtown sneering doesn’t communicate to the car dealers, who say they’re white and they’re proud loud as they can. The car dealers understand one thing and one thing only: nobody is going to tell them how to live. Telling people how to live is their job. That’s how they define freedom: imposing on yours. The entirety of America’s mechanisms to discipline and punish its truly unruly and innovative has been a quiet flattery of the car dealers, their fear of the cities they never go to and surround in their tiny fiefdoms. All Trump did was make it obvious and vulgar, and then made that vulgarity a virtue. “Vulgarity as virtue” is as Kid Rock as it gets. It is in that way they have defanged transgression, a transgression Kid Rock always pretended to exemplify. But you can’t transgress with what’s already been invented and Kid Rock has brought nothing new to the table. They prefer it that way. It makes it so all that’s left is pose, that all that’s left is two words: “fuck you.”
CODA: NO ONE IS GOING TO TELL ME HOW TO LIVE
“Look around. I live in my own world. And it’s great.”
—Kid Rock, from “How Kid Rock Went From America’s Favorite Hard-Partying Rock Star to a MAGA Mouthpiece”
“Will you tell everyone that I was halfway cool?”
—Kid Rock, same article.
He’s drunk. White wine on ice, served by a white butler named Uncle Tom. He’s been drunk in interviews before. He’s brandished a gun before, in those days when Kid Rock was walking out, the big fur coat, the revolver shoved in his pants. Not during an interview. He’s a different kind of drunk. He says, for the first time on record since “Black Chick, White Guy”, that word that starts with an n. His friend Trick Trick, from Detroit, a black Trump supporter who doesn’t answer the phone. Kid Rock calls him the n word.
He’s shooting beer cans. He’s probably drunk, and may have had some Bud Lights before he started shooting Bud Lights. It’s on social media and it’s on the news. He did it because they had a trans spokeswoman. In Detroit she would be dissed, he may remember, bubbles in his brain.
20 odd years after he wore an American flag as a poncho at the Super Bowl halftime show, Bad Bunny got invited to do it. A Puerto Rican rapper-singer, of all things. So another half-time show was planned, one that was as much a coronation: you are our most important rockstar. It gets an official endorsement, the Turning Point USA half-time show. “The great Bob Ritchie aka KID ROCK” says Vice-President JD Vance. A child of the heartland that wants you to desperately believe is a child of the South, the real American heartland, upon which everything else is in America is an extrapolation from Kid Rock must be the ultimate rock star embodiment of.
6.1 million people watch, they claim. Kid Rock comes out. The fedora is on as are the jorts. He looks like a carny. “Bawitdaba” plays. It’s time to get in the pit and love someone. What comes through the speakers is Kid Rock’s voice, but from his rowdier days. He runs around the stage, mouthing along, all those nice things about his heroes in the methadone clinics. Later he comes out to sing “Til You Can’t”, a bit of quasi-Christian doggerel from the “Picture” side of things, teasing his “gospel” album.
128 million people watch Bad Bunny. He dances in cane fields, through blackouts. It looks like a great time: Bad Bunny is a handsome man surrounded by an army of beautiful dancers. Lady Gaga shows up. So does Pedro Pascal. Kid Rock, backstage, has whatever beer is available and pretends he gives a fuck about Lee Bice. Non DEI celebrations here only. The next day he has to explain that his DJ hit a button wrong, he isn’t lip-synching. It doesn’t matter. Apache helicopters fly over his house. He gives a speech to US soldiers, likely about to deploy to Iran. He does push-ups and sit-ups with Robert F. Kennedy, who works out in jeans. His beer gut hangs over his jeans, organs bursting, a ptosis over his workout clothes, screaming: “We can’t keep living life this way.” To which Kid Rock replies: “Til you can’t”.
130 million versus 5. Once he sold ten million albums, played the Super Bowl. He knows, somewhere, what’s left of his fame is this now. He knows it. He thinks back to what he said in that interview. “Prince is known for ‘Purple Rain.’ I’m known for shooting up Bud Light cans!”
The interviewer asked back. “But do you want that? You don’t want that to be your epitaph.”
“I don’t care.”
People like JD Vance will tell him it feels like it’s Woodstock ‘99 again, where his band plays lead-up and Uncle Kracker gets the crowd pumped up and he walks out: the big fur coat, the hat, the biggest song around. But with all the hype sand-blasted away through time, what was always apparent is becoming more so. The man who sells you the con always knows the con is almost up, so he sells you his personality. The personality is how you stay famous. You shoot beer cans. You shout slurs on stage and in interviews. He can betray the first love he ever had, the people who cared for you when your dad hated your early music, your first girlfriend, and the people who watched you turn into him. But you have to keep moving to stay alive.
So he walks out, again and again, whether it’s to the fence posts, on stage. Ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Robert Ritchie. His name is Kid Rock.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SPECIAL THANKS
This essay was an undertaking not like any I’ve done before. Special thanks should be paid to a few figures. Much of the discussion of Hank Williams Jr and David Allan Coe was inspired by conversations I had with the writer and poet Raven Mack about the nature of the transition from outlaw country to what it would come. The specific example of Jim Goad was inspired by yet another conversation, this time with Dr. Paul Robertson of Marshall University. Dr. Robertson is an especially important figure; our 300 level course at VCU on comics and southern identity created much of the foregrounding for me to think about a figure like Kid Rock specifically.
To comment specifically on sources: the most important source I encountered was “Kid Rock before the fame: A Definitive Detroit oral history”, published in The Detroit Free Press and compiled by Brian McCollum. Because not very much critical attention has been paid to Kid Rock’s earliest hip-hop albums, there is not much biographical information out there, and McCollum’s work rectifies that. While I am including a bibliography of sources, I should note that I elected to not use in-text citations except as hyperlinks. The reason for this being that I felt it broke up the flow and put an intellectual work too in the academic sphere.
I use Rolling Stone as a primary source because of its place in the American rock critical myth and to point out the need for Rolling Stone to be the most important music magazine in America means that an ostensibly liberal magazine promoted someone until they could undergo the process of selling him as a heel during his fascist turn. To that effect, David Peisner’s 2025 interview is telling, but we have to depart on a very specific thing. It’s an excellent piece of work that gets deeply to the naked provocation and reasons Kid Rock might have taken this path. However, I disagree when Peisner writes:
The strange thing is, despite his rhetoric, Ritchie’s politics aren’t uniformly regressive. He considers himself socially liberal. And the longer we argue, the more I can see the faint outlines of reasonable stances on things like immigration, government regulation of corporations, and tax policy. But here’s the thing: Nobody will ever hear any of that over the shouting, the name-calling, and all of his other attention-grabbing bullshit. I don’t think he really cares because the shouting, the name-calling, and the attention-grabbing bullshit are who he is now. It’s as if the blurry line between Kid Rock and Bob Ritchie has disappeared entirely.
I disagree there was ever much of a line, or if Kid Rock has anything to say. It always was about the attention-grabbing bullshit. Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age Production” ends by concluding that the fascists aestheticize politics. Building the entire plane out of vociferous disagreement, treating political argument with contempt because you believe might makes right is the game. Applying force without pulling a gun.
On a personal level, Kid Rock seems like he can be incredibly charming, something admitted as much. Maybe that charm is why Rolling Stone promoted him so heavily. Con men often are.
Bibliography
McCollum, Brian . 2015. “Kid Rock before the Fame: The Definitive Detroit Oral History.” The Detroit Free Press. August 6, 2015. https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/brian-mccollum/2015/08/26/kid-rock-early-years-detroit/31193049/.
“Gold & Platinum - RIAA.” 2015. RIAA. August 26, 2015. https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/?reload=1788620344193&tab_active=recent-award&sub_tab_active=&se=Hank%20Williams%20Jr.&from=&to=&ti=&lab=&formats%5B%5D=Album&col=certification_date&ord=asc#search_section.
Reindl, JC. 2026. “Detroit Club Slapped with $6.3M Jury Verdict over Racism Complaints.” Detroit Free Press. June 26, 2026. https://www.freep.com/story/money/business/2026/06/26/detroit-club-racism-verdict/90706903007/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=true&gca-epti=z11xx58p119450l117750c119450e1192xxv11xx58d--46--b--46--&gca-ft=203&gca-ds=sophi.
Selasky, Susan. 2021. “Caucus Club in Detroit Warns Diners to Dress Properly, Not Smell like Marijuana.” Detroit Free Press. March 25, 2021. https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/dining/2021/03/25/detroit-caucus-club-dress-code-marijuana-odor/6989298002/?gnt-cfr=1&gca-cat=p&gca-uir=true&gca-epti=z1170xxe1170xxv003258d--36--b--36--&gca-ft=157&gca-ds=sophi.
Heath, Chris. 2000. “The Low Times and High Life of Kid Rock” in Rolling Stone. June 22, 2000.
Doyle, Patrick. 2015. “The Killer Inside Kid Rock” in Rolling Stone. February 26, 2015.
Itzkoff, Dave. 2011. “At N.A.A.C.P. Event, Kid Rock Defends Use of Confederate Flag.” ArtsBeat. May 2, 2011. https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/at-n-a-a-c-p-event-kid-rock-defends-use-of-confederate-flag/.
Kreps, Daniel. 2015. “Kid Rock Tells Protestors to ‘Kiss My Ass’ Over Confederate Flag.” Rolling Stone. July 10, 2015. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kid-rock-tells-protestors-to-kiss-my-ass-over-confederate-flag-229303/.
Blabbermouth. 2005. “KID ROCK’s Scheduled Appearance At BUSH Inaugural ‘Shocking.’” Blabbermouth.NET. January 6, 2005. https://blabbermouth.net/news/kid-rock-s-scheduled-appearance-at-bush-inaugural-shocking.
Blabbermouth. 2005. “BUSH Twins Wanted KID ROCK At Inaugural Concert.” Blabbermouth.NET. January 26, 2005. https://blabbermouth.net/news/bush-twins-wanted-kid-rock-at-inaugural-concert.
“Kid Rock To Obama: ‘No Hard Feelings’ Over Election Victory.” 2012. HuffPost. December 3, 2012. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kid-rock-obama-no-hard-feelings-election_n_2231190
Peisner, David. “How Kid Rock Went from America’s Favorite Hard-Partying Rock Star to a Maga Mouthpiece.” Rolling Stone, May 20, 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/kid-rock-republican-mouthpiece-trump-maga-bff-1235019530/.
Hays, Gabriel, and Fox News. “Kid Rock Shoots up Bud Light Cans with Rifle to Protest Dylan Mulvaney Partnership: ‘F--- Bud Light.’” Fox News. Accessed October 13, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/media/kid-rock-shoots-bud-light-cans-rifle-protest-dylan-mulvaney-partnership-f-bud-light.
Blabbermouth. “Senator Blasts Kid Rock for Wearing Flag.” BLABBERMOUTH.NET, February 13, 2004. https://blabbermouth.net/news/senator-blasts-kid-rock-for-wearing-flag.
“JD Vance (@jdvance) on X.” X (formerly Twitter), February 3, 2026. https://x.com/JDVance/status/2018666758547362252.
“Turning Point USA’s All-American Halftime Show Draws 6.1M Concurrent Viewers on YouTube - the Athletic.” The Athletic, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7031946/2026/02/08/turning-point-usa-halftime-show-pete-hegseth/.
“Super Bowl LX Draws 124.9 Million Viewers, Bad Bunny 128.2 Million - the Athletic.” The Athletic, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7036613/2026/02/10/super-bowl-ratings-nfl-nbc-bad-bunny/.
Christopher Sloce is from Wise, Virginia and lives in Richmond, Virginia. He publishes nonfiction regularly and short fiction intermittently. His ezine Kentucky Meat Shower is hosted at kittysneezes.com along with his monthly culture column Apophany. His contributions to the studies of Football Metaphysics are conducted alongside Raven Mack and others here.