Kid Rock: The Wasted Bandwidth of His Lyrics In My Brain

HIS NAME IS...

I heard Kid Rock is in the news again! It’s a good time to check out this rewritten Medium post, and remember why we all decided to have a good season or two of listening before pretending he never existed.

First, a disclaimer:

I used to really like Kid Rock. Back when he first came out at the turn of the millennium, he was doing that wild, white boy, hybrid metal that many of us that lived through it can’t ever forget. It might never get to the OG, “Judgment Night” era of Public Enemy and Anthrax, but we legitimately loved many nümetal/rap rock bands like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Hed pe, Korn, Powerman 5000, and Korn, as they screamed into our lives only for most to be forgotten with extreme prejudice just a few years later. But through it all there was one man “getting behind himself,” presumably to give himself a reach around. His name is… Kid Rock. And his lyrics have a permanent, undeserved home inside of my head.

“Kid Rock it up and down your block with a bottle of scotch and watch lots of crotch”  —  Cowboy

This is not good music. Even for its time, this was not really good music. This is the toothy maw from which modern toxic masculinity crawled. There are also crazy inconsistencies between the content of groups like Incubus, P.O.D., and Linkin Park and the irreverent sounds of Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit, but since they had DJs in their bands they’re all some form of nümetal. Rap laced nümetal had all of the anti-feminism and violent power fantasies of the west gangster rap records like Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, but (attempts at) all the hypermasculine, unrelenting octane of Metallica and Pantera. The lyrics make gangster rap hard, but metal literally sounds hard. Kid Rock and late 90s rap metal attempt to mash these up in a mosh pit that can only end up like the ones at Woodstock 99 (content warning). I’m just saying, I know why men are like this, and I’ve known for a long time. Men really are trash, and for my age group, so much of it is right there in this music we loved.

“I’m not Peter Pan I don’t fuck with fairies, but I bust more rhymes than virgin cherries.”  —  Fuck Off

Kid Rock made mean-spirited music for mean-spirited people, and it dominated the radio 20 years ago. This man shared MTV stages with Run DMC. This man’s song became the only other theme for the Undertaker, one of the most storied WWE wrestlers of the past 40 years who started riding a motorcycle to the ring just because of Kid Rock’s track. This man Eminem is on a song on his first album and there’s not even a featuring on the record or stream. Kid Rock was huge between 1998 and 2002, and heaven help me, I absolutely loved it. That someone could make music that sounded like where I was from, but combine it with the swagger and lyrical agility(ish) of the hip-hop music I also loved was inspiring to a black kid from Texas who never really fit in. Finally… I and the kids I grew up around could get along on something.

“Buncha white boys pimpin’ like the K.I.D.”  —  Devil Without a Cause

See, one of the special things about Kid Rock, in particular, was that while some friends would vilify rap music in favor of music with “good family values” like country; somehow they’d end up bumping Kid Rock’s Devil Without A Cause all the way to church. Rather than dispute the clear difference in values, and give any thought to why this might be the case, I was just glad to not be listening to George Straight while riding along. That special thing was that is that Kid Rock was white. Those same types would pull this a year later because they all loved Eminem too. See, the Black rappers only talked about money and women, while the metal guys were more diverse in their lyrics like picking up prostitutes in LA after calling Heidi Fleiss like Kid Rock.

“Gotta make this money. Gotta make this money. This money is me this money is everything I do and see, who are you to judge me?”  —  Fist of Rage

Personally, I engage with music by learning what people talk about in their songs. I love the lyrics although other people don’t pay as much conscious attention to them. While there’s an argument to be made that words of songs don’t affect how we think or feel about them or ourselves, I do believe it’s worth noting that electronic and classical music don’t dominate Spotify plays. So there’s clearly something to the effect of us hearing voices tell us things with a melody and rhythm.

Since I’ve always wanted to perform like my favorite stars of a given era, I have more time than most into learning the lyrics and style. Now here I am 20 years later with so much Kid Rock in my head only I now know what he’s talking about. 16-year-old Mike didn’t know what 8-balls were, who Heidi Fleiss and the “chicks with beepers” were, or that anybody was attracted enough to the girl from the Beetlejuice movie to call her out in a song. I would very much like a late 90s do-over. I swear I’d only listen to the Spice Girls, Busta Rhymes, and Paula Cole.

“I said it too many times and I still stand firm. You get what you put in and people get what they deserve.” —  Only God Knows Why

I don’t know the lyrics to any of Kid Rock’s music from the last 15 years, and I’m grateful for that despite the fact that it’s probably nowhere near as misogynistic and gross as the stuff in the 90s. The flip side is he did seem to care what Black people thought about him with those “Al Roker and “Oprah” lines. Today, his current music has a rebel flag conservatism to it. As with any public figure, it’s unreasonable to say what their politics actually are based on anything other than facts, but he is on record supporting both Mitt Romney in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016. But he also played Barack Obama’s inauguration. But he remade Sweet Home Alabama for his own country radio hit and called rap rock “gay” which kinda says everything you need to know and might be the most Kid Rock thing ever. His new crossover crowd loves him for this stuff, and seemingly always will.

“…30 pack of hoes! No rogaine and the propane flows!”  —  American Bad Ass

Even Kid Rock knew enough to knock this rap shit off after 2 albums. He’d been in the game a while but only blew up in ’98. After that unexpected, yet sizable hit with Cheryl Crow, switching gears to doing less rap and more rock-based music seemed like a good idea. He’d been slumming it in hip hop music as a white guy since 1988, then got so big his DJ Uncle Kracker got hits by association.

Unfortunately, By 2003, nümetal was dead, his little homie Joe C was dead, and 9/11 had happened. He must have figured he might as well do southern rock albums with old-sounding songs with racist ass Hank Williams Jr. titled (and I shit you not…) “Cadillac Pussy.” (God it’s so gross.) At least the rap-rock stuff was fun. Songs like this that sound 40 years older than they really help call attention to the fact that a lot of the male toxicity didn’t actually start with nümetal at all. We all knew that if we were paying attention, we can ask Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Motley Crüe, and practically every other rockstar about that.

“Pussy and blow. You know how I live!”  —  Forever

…while only god knows why I can recite so much of this stuff for you all these many years later.