Kid Rock, a.k.a. Bob Ritchie, used to bring together rock, country, and hip-hop fans with his eclectic music. Now his MAGA politics are dividing fans.
Kid Rock, a.k.a. Bob Ritchie, used to bring together rock, country, and hip-hop fans with his eclectic music. Now his MAGA politics are dividing fans.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ritchie’s entire sprawling 214-acre compound, which includes a saloon, a studio, and a cavernous hangar with a pickleball court, a basketball hoop, and the original General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard in it, feels like what a 13-year-old boy might sketch if you asked him to design his dream home.
Ritchie is wearing dark sunglasses, a black shirt, jeans, and boots that he says “may or may not be snakeskin.” His stringy blond hair runs straight to his shoulders from underneath a white-and-red baseball hat with the phrase “This Bud’s for You” emblazoned on the front of it, framing a face that, at 53, looks more weathered than boyish.
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.
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.
Kid Rock’s Jive debut, Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast, a sex-obsessed goof equally indebted to the twin poles of late-Eighties party rap, the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill and 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be, didn’t connect with audiences, and amid a subsequent Vanilla Ice-induced backlash, he was dropped from the label.
Sure, he will parrot Fox News talking points about immigration, foreign policy, or the economy, but what he seems most drawn to in Trump as a rich, famous, attention-hungry loudmouth whose cartoonish persona was once universally celebrated but is now toxic to half the populace is a reflection that looks a lot like his own.
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