Some of Kid Rock’s best-known work is mashups of genres and past hits. He made a fortune fusing rap and metal. He created a worldwide chartbuster mixing “Werewolves of London” with “Sweet Home Alabama.” Now he’s sewing a political image cut from the theatrics of Idiocracy’s President Camacho and Bulworth’s rhyming titular character.
“Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome the next senator of the great state of Michigan: Kid m————-ing Rock!” announced an emcee at the artist’s concert in Detroit on Tuesday night. The Motor City bad boy, now a bad man at 46, has been teasing a run for higher office the last couple of months. He tweeted the website kidrockforsenate.com with his endorsement on July 12, but doubters in the press observed that it resembled a merchandising opportunity. He stated two weeks later that he was establishing a tax-exempt organization to promote voter registration while he explored a run—reserving the right to “use this media circus to sell/promote whatever I damn well please.” This includes Kid Rock for Senate T-shirts, hats, yard signs, and bumper stickers—available from Warner Brothers, which released his most recent album in 2015.
It was speculated twice this week that Rock would make a statement about his future. The first turned out to be a blog post inveighing against activists protesting his selection as the opening act for the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, including those affiliated with Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. The president of NAN’s Detroit chapter said Rock “is known to be dog-whistling and cat-calling to white supremacist organizations and the white supremacist community.” Rock chalked up the dissent to an old practice: his incorporation of the Confederate flag into his southern rock performances in the early 2000s, which his spokesman said he stopped doing several years ago. “P.P.P.P.P.S. I LOVE BLACK PEOPLE!!” he wrote on Monday morning. That’s five postscripts, in case you’re wondering if Rock ever has anything to get off his chest.
At his concert on Tuesday night, the words came straight from his gut, filtered through his gravelly throat. It’s not often we journalists quote political figures in verse, but Rock began
Mark him down as a “maybe” on Graham-Cassidy.
He continued in the same vein for five more stanzas, pulsating about welfare-to-work, absentee fathers, race relations, gay and transgender issues, and divine guidance in the war on “tyrants.” He next declared, “I love black people / white people too / but neither as much as … the red, white, and blue.” Then he fantasized about holding his junk inside the Oval Office, which delegitimized his segue into the song “You Never Met A M——-f——- Quite Like Me.”
As shocking as it is, this was not a campaign announcement speech. His intentions remain unclear. But if Kid Rock the stage performer runs, this is what we’re getting: a defiant, unapologetic, anti-establishment man of the people. This not only is a combination that helped Donald Trump become president. It is the exact type of branding that is profitable for many an aspiring public figure who have tried it.
But herein is the complication of Rock’s political ambitions. As Politico Magazine’s Tim Alberta and Zack Stanton put it: “Perhaps the greatest challenge will be deciding whether he wants to be Kid Rock or Bobby Ritchie—not for purposes of ballot identification or campaign literature, but rather, the persona he wants to present voters.”
Robert “Bobby” Ritchie grew up in a well-off family in Romeo, Michigan. He has a son and a granddaughter, of whom he speaks like a practiced father and granddad. “Listen, my son graduated college and he has a job. That alone, as a parent, is such a relief,” he told Rolling Stone last year. “Now I have a beautiful granddaughter, on top of it? It’s pretty crazy. My friends say, ‘How lucky are you, to be able to see your granddaughter do so much stuff? You’ll be at her wedding.’ So many things you might not see if you have kids later in life, which seems to be the trend now for most responsible adults.”
The irresponsible ones have received Ritchie’s—or Kid Rock’s—scorn: “You deadbeat dads who refuse to be a man / Who refuse to be there for your sons and raise them up to be good men / You no-good, derelict, sperm donor wannabes / I say lock all you a—h—— up, and throw away the f—-ing keys!”
Rock supports the legality of same-sex marriage, like almost two-thirds of the country does. He also says, “No, you don’t get to choose, because whatever you have between your legs should determine the bathroom that you use.” He’s the person who condemns Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem and says the next line, “Nazis … bigots, and now again the KKK? I say f—- all you racists, stay the hell away.” There’s threading the needle, or trying to find middle ground among conflicting parties. Then there’s shearing the far end of either side of the blanket so it only covers the people Rock would find reasonable. “[B]y the way, f—- the extreme left and the extreme right!” he said on Monday. It’s triangulation by a different name, one that’s probably too profane to print.
Off-stage, Ritchie has expressed a similar worldview in milder terms, like he did earlier this year in an interview with Dan Rather. “My patience grows very thin around a lack of common sense,” he told the interviewer, when asked what it is that angers him. On politicians: “I don’t trust any of these guys. Still don’t.”
Presumably, that includes Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, though you wouldn’t know otherwise. Ritchie says he asked the former Republican presidential nominee 15 policy questions when Romney solicited his endorsement in 2012. Ritchie liked what he heard. And he described his subsequent support of the ex-Massachusetts governor in the Rockiest way possible: “He’s the most decent [you’ve read the word enough by now] I’ve ever met in my life.”
Rock/Ritchie could be a two-man ticket running for office, unlike Trump, the reality star in real life. It would be a fascinating measure of how far brash populism can take a candidate in these times: If it’s replicable in Trump country, if it can work again on a large scale unfiltered, if it would be rendered ineffective the second Rock showed his Ritchie side. Or this all could be a big goof on the public.
“[I’m] somebody who likes to have fun, who likes to treat people kind, have a great time, stands up for what he believes in at all costs,” Ritchie told Rather. “And, yeah, I like to jerk people’s chains a little bit.”
