Post by Admin on May 21, 2024 17:35:17 GMT
Kid Rock wasn’t always like this. When he first broke through with Devil Without a Cause in the late Nineties, on the heels of an alt-rock era whose biggest stars — Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell — were often cripplingly conflicted about the very idea of stardom, Ritchie made rap rock full of swagger, bravado, and party-starting anarchy. Even as he began hinting at a rightward political lean in the late 2000s, he still managed to inhabit a cultural middle ground, crossing boundaries between musical genres and political ideologies with an easygoing, can’t-we-all-just-get-drunk-together nonchalance. Whether he was performing with Run-D.M.C., (briefly) marrying Pamela Anderson, or getting into a fight at a Waffle House at 5 a.m., Kid Rock’s very existence felt like a 100-decibel reminder that rock & roll was supposed to be fun. Rolling Stone itself was all-in on this version of Kid Rock, twice putting him on the magazine’s cover solo and declaring him “the king of old-school partying and take-no-prisoners boasting.”
Over the past decade, though, he’s grown increasingly polarizing, eager to troll liberals and engage in one culture-war dust-up after another. He’s wrapped himself in all things Trump and become as much a fixture of the MAGA Cinematic Universe as Steve Bannon, Mike Lindell, or Kari Lake. In fact, just before we crowd into that van for the Fox News appearance, Ritchie flashes his cellphone toward me to show he’s calling the man he now winkingly refers to as “one of my besties.” Trump doesn’t pick up. “I was going to tell him I’m going on Laura Ingraham,” Ritchie tells me. “He loves to watch when I do Fox hits.”
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We The People · Kid Rock · Dan Frizsell
We The People
I’d started working on a story about Kid Rock’s transformation from everyone’s favorite life-of-the-party rock star into this fervent MAGA warrior nearly a year earlier. Until a couple of days before our meeting at his house, I’d given up hope that he’d talk to me. I’d reached out repeatedly to his manager to try to set up an interview but got no response. As I began contacting others in his inner circle — friends, bandmates — Ritchie was telling them not to talk to me. I pressed ahead and spoke to more than a dozen people who’d been close to him at various points in his career. Many were dismayed at the extreme political turn Kid Rock had taken.
Producer and engineer Mike E. Clark, who has a long history with Ritchie going back to the late 1980s, compared it to “losing a family member,” and said he no longer hung up his Kid Rock platinum records “because of what it represents now.” Kenny Olson, who played lead guitar for Ritchie for more than a decade starting in the mid-1990s, was just perplexed.
“I don’t understand where a lot of this came from,” he told me. “I’ve always felt music should inspire people, not divide people. A lot of people from back in the day ask me, ‘What’s going on?’ I don’t know.”
In an age when many people have a story about a relative who arrived at Thanksgiving in a red MAGA hat, and shortly thereafter started forwarding BitChute videos and QAnon memes, the idea that a rich white guy would become a die-hard Trump supporter is not exactly shocking. But Ritchie always seemed to be in on the joke of his outrageous Kid Rock persona. These days, though, it’s hard not to wonder who’s at the wheel.
Obviously, the best person to address this is Ritchie himself, so I sent one last Hail Mary to his manager. Much to my surprise, this time, I got a response: an offer to meet Ritchie two days later for what was supposed to be a 90-minute tête-à-tête.
I’m not really sure what changed his mind. It could be that he knows a contentious story in Rolling Stone will give him a platform to shout about liberal-media bias and bolster his status on the right. Or it could just be that he’s got something to promote, a new festival he co-founded called Rock the Country that’s playing in seven smaller cities and towns across Appalachia and the Southeast this spring and summer. At any rate, by the time we’re done with Laura Ingraham, we’ve blown way past our allotted time, but he’s just getting warmed up. Soon enough, he’ll get drunk and belligerent, and the evening will go way off the rails, but at the moment, things are still pretty cordial. He tells me that until a few weeks ago, he’d done very few interviews in the past decade.
According to Love, Ritchie’s political coming out put the Confederate-flag controversy in a different context. “It wasn’t until he started tripping with Trump that it started looking bad,” says Love, who still considers Ritchie a friend. “The Trump situation changed the whole vibe. People say he’s prejudiced. He’s not. How can you be prejudiced if your son is Black?”
Others made the same point. “I never got the racist, homophobic vibe from him,” says Barbara Payton, a backing singer who toured with Kid Rock in the 2000s. “As a gay woman, I wouldn’t have worked for him if I did.”
Even some, like Harmon, who’ve had personal gripes with Ritchie are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least to a point. “Do I think Kid Rock is straight-up racist? No,” Harmon says. “Do I think Kid Rock is a dickhead? Yes.”
Over the past few years, Kid Rock shows have started to resemble Trump rallies. Clark, who helped craft Kid Rock’s last major hit, “All Summer Long,” worked as a monitor tech on tour with him in 2018, and was alarmed by what he saw. “He started throwing Trump up on the giant screen, like, ‘This is your president now, so deal with it!’” he says. “I was horrified. It’s a hate machine. It’s all these white people, and it’s like, ‘What hasn’t this country given to these people?’ Especially Bob Ritchie. What hasn’t this country given him? What are you so angry about?”
Over the past decade, though, he’s grown increasingly polarizing, eager to troll liberals and engage in one culture-war dust-up after another. He’s wrapped himself in all things Trump and become as much a fixture of the MAGA Cinematic Universe as Steve Bannon, Mike Lindell, or Kari Lake. In fact, just before we crowd into that van for the Fox News appearance, Ritchie flashes his cellphone toward me to show he’s calling the man he now winkingly refers to as “one of my besties.” Trump doesn’t pick up. “I was going to tell him I’m going on Laura Ingraham,” Ritchie tells me. “He loves to watch when I do Fox hits.”
Provided to YouTube by DistroKid
We The People · Kid Rock · Dan Frizsell
We The People
I’d started working on a story about Kid Rock’s transformation from everyone’s favorite life-of-the-party rock star into this fervent MAGA warrior nearly a year earlier. Until a couple of days before our meeting at his house, I’d given up hope that he’d talk to me. I’d reached out repeatedly to his manager to try to set up an interview but got no response. As I began contacting others in his inner circle — friends, bandmates — Ritchie was telling them not to talk to me. I pressed ahead and spoke to more than a dozen people who’d been close to him at various points in his career. Many were dismayed at the extreme political turn Kid Rock had taken.
Producer and engineer Mike E. Clark, who has a long history with Ritchie going back to the late 1980s, compared it to “losing a family member,” and said he no longer hung up his Kid Rock platinum records “because of what it represents now.” Kenny Olson, who played lead guitar for Ritchie for more than a decade starting in the mid-1990s, was just perplexed.
“I don’t understand where a lot of this came from,” he told me. “I’ve always felt music should inspire people, not divide people. A lot of people from back in the day ask me, ‘What’s going on?’ I don’t know.”
In an age when many people have a story about a relative who arrived at Thanksgiving in a red MAGA hat, and shortly thereafter started forwarding BitChute videos and QAnon memes, the idea that a rich white guy would become a die-hard Trump supporter is not exactly shocking. But Ritchie always seemed to be in on the joke of his outrageous Kid Rock persona. These days, though, it’s hard not to wonder who’s at the wheel.
Obviously, the best person to address this is Ritchie himself, so I sent one last Hail Mary to his manager. Much to my surprise, this time, I got a response: an offer to meet Ritchie two days later for what was supposed to be a 90-minute tête-à-tête.
I’m not really sure what changed his mind. It could be that he knows a contentious story in Rolling Stone will give him a platform to shout about liberal-media bias and bolster his status on the right. Or it could just be that he’s got something to promote, a new festival he co-founded called Rock the Country that’s playing in seven smaller cities and towns across Appalachia and the Southeast this spring and summer. At any rate, by the time we’re done with Laura Ingraham, we’ve blown way past our allotted time, but he’s just getting warmed up. Soon enough, he’ll get drunk and belligerent, and the evening will go way off the rails, but at the moment, things are still pretty cordial. He tells me that until a few weeks ago, he’d done very few interviews in the past decade.
According to Love, Ritchie’s political coming out put the Confederate-flag controversy in a different context. “It wasn’t until he started tripping with Trump that it started looking bad,” says Love, who still considers Ritchie a friend. “The Trump situation changed the whole vibe. People say he’s prejudiced. He’s not. How can you be prejudiced if your son is Black?”
Others made the same point. “I never got the racist, homophobic vibe from him,” says Barbara Payton, a backing singer who toured with Kid Rock in the 2000s. “As a gay woman, I wouldn’t have worked for him if I did.”
Even some, like Harmon, who’ve had personal gripes with Ritchie are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least to a point. “Do I think Kid Rock is straight-up racist? No,” Harmon says. “Do I think Kid Rock is a dickhead? Yes.”
Over the past few years, Kid Rock shows have started to resemble Trump rallies. Clark, who helped craft Kid Rock’s last major hit, “All Summer Long,” worked as a monitor tech on tour with him in 2018, and was alarmed by what he saw. “He started throwing Trump up on the giant screen, like, ‘This is your president now, so deal with it!’” he says. “I was horrified. It’s a hate machine. It’s all these white people, and it’s like, ‘What hasn’t this country given to these people?’ Especially Bob Ritchie. What hasn’t this country given him? What are you so angry about?”