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DURING YOUR VISIT BOB RITCHIE at his home in the rugged hills outside Nashville, the man who will likely greet you at the door is a tall, well-dressed, extremely polite man who calls himself “Uncle Tom.” Because of course he does. Ritchie makes his living as Kid Rock, but a big part of being Kid Rock these days involves doing things that are both provocative, offensive and, at least for him, funny. So it seems that a middle-aged white man who began his career more than three decades ago in thrall to a black art form, but has since joined a predominantly white political movement criticized for its racist rhetoric, would be having a white butler named after a racial slur aimed at black people who are too accommodating to the white establishment. This is all a bit dizzying. Like so many things in Kid Rock’s world circa 2024, one wonders, “Is he serious?” Is he fucking with me? Does he know it himself?
Anyway, here I am on a Thursday afternoon in April, driven by the aforementioned Uncle Tom to a house that itself seems like a joke designed to test whether its visitors understand. Designed to resemble the White House, this extravagant and airy mansion is decorated with stuffed hunting trophies and neon beer signs. The bathroom towels are monogrammed with an “R” and a mirror near the sink features a nude woman wearing a “Liberty” headband painted pink. Images of Kid Rock’s platinum records adorn garage doors. Ritchie’s entire sprawling 214-acre compound, which includes a lounge, studio and cavernous hangar with a pickleball court, basketball hoop and the original General Lee of The Dukes of Hazzard This looks like what a 13 year old boy might draw if you asked him to design his dream house.
Tom gets me a can of Miller Lite from the kitchen refrigerator, then leads me out to the back patio, where Ritchie sits with a charcuterie board on the table in front of him, and the breathtaking panorama of the surrounding countryside the look at. in the face. Ritchie stands up, shakes my hand and asks Tom for a white wine with ice and a cigar.
“That’s his real name, by the way,” Ritchie said with a lively laugh. “Don’t bullshit me in the article.”
Ritchie wears dark sunglasses, a black shirt, jeans, and boots that he says “may or may not be snakeskin.” His stringy blonde hair falls straight to his shoulders beneath a white and red baseball cap with the phrase “This Bud’s for You” emblazoned across the front, framing a face that, at 53, looks more aged than boy . He claims he didn’t realize he was wearing the hat – something he would claim again two hours later to Fox News host Laura Ingraham when he insisted I join him at the back of an unmarked van in his driveway to tape an appearance on his show – but I find that hard to believe. The hat gives him an opening to tell the story of his beef and recent reconciliation with Anheuser-Busch.
Last year, Ritchie responded to the company’s decision to partner with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a Bud Light promotion by posting a video of him shooting beer cans with an MP5 machine gun and declaring “Fuck Bud Light. Damn Anheuser-Busch. The partnership between an iconic brewing company and a trans woman had already sparked a right-wing boycott of the beer maker, and Ritchie’s stunt fanned the flames. He has been criticized for encouraging bigotry and anti-trans violence. Far from repentant, Ritchie saw the company’s falling stock price as vindication and says his top executives contacted him personally, eager to mend fences. As he tells Ingraham, even though the company “messed up,” he abandoned the boycott. (Anheuser-Busch did not respond to my request for comment on this meeting.)
“We have bigger goals,” he says, referring to Planet Fitness, which is currently in the crosshairs of the right-wing outrage machine for its trans inclusion policies, and Ben & Jerry’s, a perpetual bugaboo among conservatives. “I don’t want to hurt people’s jobs and that sort of thing when they don’t have a dog in the fight, but there are a lot of other businesses we should be pursuing.” Bulldozing over the contradictions inherent in that phrase, Ritchie uses the remainder of his Fox appearance to denounce “DEI bullshit,” predict Donald Trump’s election victory in Michigan, and suggest that listening to the national anthem will “sink liberal tears like rain.” .”
Kid Rock wasn’t always like this. When he first broke through with Devil without a cause In the late ’90s, on the heels of an era of alternative rock whose biggest stars – Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell – were often in paralyzing conflict over the very idea of stardom, Ritchie created a rap rock full of swagger, bravado and partying. -trigger anarchy. Even though he began hinting at a right-wing political leaning in the late 2000s, he still managed to inhabit a cultural middle ground, crossing boundaries between musical genres and political ideologies with a casual, can’t we just get drunk. -together nonchalance. Whether he was performing with Run-DMC, (briefly) marrying Pamela Anderson, or fighting in 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 he himself was all-in on this version of Kid Rock, putting him solo on the magazine cover twice and declaring him “the king of old-fashioned partying and take-no-prisoners bragging.”
Over the past decade, however, he has become increasingly polarizing, eager to troll liberals and engage in one culture war after another. He’s wrapped himself in all things Trump and become as much a staple of the MAGA cinematic universe as Steve Bannon, Mike Lindell or Kari Lake. In fact, just before we gather in that van for the Fox News appearance, Ritchie shows me his cell phone to show that he’s calling the man he now winkingly calls “one of my best friends “. Trump does not respond. “I was going to tell him I’m going after Laura Ingraham,” Ritchie told me. “He loves watching me when I do Fox hits.”
I had started working on a story about Kid Rock’s transformation from everyone’s favorite rock star to this devout MAGA warrior almost a year earlier. Until a few days before our meeting at his house, I had given up hope that he would speak to me. I had contacted his manager several times to try to arrange an interview, but received no response. As I began contacting others in his circle – friends, bandmates – Ritchie would tell them not to talk to me. I went on and spoke to more than a dozen people who had been close to him at different points in his career. Many were dismayed by the extreme political turn Kid Rock took.
Producer and audio engineer Mike E. Clark, who has a long history with Ritchie dating back to the late 1980s, likened it to “losing a family member” and said he didn’t 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 simply perplexed.
“I don’t understand where all this comes from,” he told me. “I always believed that music should inspire people, not divide them. A lot of people at the time were asking me, “What’s going on?” I don’t know.”
In an era when many people tell stories of a relative who arrived at Thanksgiving wearing a red MAGA hat and, shortly thereafter, began forwarding BitChute videos and QAnon memes, the idea that a rich man white would become a die-hard Trump supporter isn’t exactly shocking. But Ritchie always seemed to be in on the joke of his outrageous Kid Rock character. But these days, it’s hard not to wonder who’s behind the wheel.
Obviously the best person to solve this problem is Ritchie himself, so I sent a final Hail Mary to his manager. To my surprise, this time I received a response: an offer to meet Ritchie two days later for what was supposed to be a 90-minute one-on-one.
I’m not sure what made him change his mind. He might have a controversial history in rolling stone will give him a platform to denounce the prejudices of the liberal media and strengthen his status on the right. Or it could just be that he has something to promote, a new festival he co-founded called Rock the Country, which is happening in seven small towns across Appalachia and the Southeast this spring and summer. Anyway, by the time we’re done with Laura Ingraham, we’re way over our allotted time, but he’s just starting to warm up. Soon he’ll get drunk and belligerent, and the evening will get derailed, but for now, things are still pretty cordial. He tells me that until a few weeks ago, he had done very few interviews over the past decade.
“I’m not sugarcoating anything, but everything became a trap moment,” he says. “That’s why I’ve refused you for so long.” I do not need it. He gestures toward his house, then toward the stunning view of the deep, green valley before him. “Look around you. I live in my own world. And it’s great.
TO UNDERSTAND WHERE Kid Rock ended up, you need to understand where he started. Although Romeo, Michigan is often described as a suburb of Detroit, when Ritchie grew up there in the 1970s and ’80s, such a designation was an exaggeration. The Detroit suburbs were already geographically sprawling, but most people would probably have considered Romeo a distant…
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News Source : www.rollingstone.com
