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.
BOB RITCHIE at his home in the jagged hills outside Nashville, the guy who will likely greet you at the door is a tall, well-dressed, exceedingly polite gentleman who goes by “Uncle Tom.” Because of course he does. Ritchie makes his living as, but a big part of being Kid Rock these days involves doing things that are simultaneously provocative, offensive, and, at least to him, funny.
“We’ve got bigger targets,” he says, referencing Planet Fitness, which is currently in the crosshairs of the right-wing outrage machine for its trans-inclusive policies, and Ben & Jerry’s, a perpetual bugaboo among conservatives. “I don’t want to hurt people’s jobs and stuff like that when they don’t have any dog in the fight, but there’s a whole lot of other companies we should be going after.
“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.” TO UNDERSTAND WHERE Kid Rock ended up, you need to understand where he started. Although Romeo, Michigan, is often described as a Detroit suburb, when Ritchie was growing up there in the Seventies and Eighties, such a designation was a stretch. The Detroit suburbs were geographically sprawling even then, but most people probably would have considered Romeo at the distant edge of that sprawl.
Ritchie tells me that his grandfather had family from Kentucky. “They grew up on mountain music and hillbilly music.” Ritchie’s dad loved music, but his taste ran toward rock & roll and classic country. “He didn’t understand what I was doing, rightfully so,” says Ritchie, “this white kid from an upper-middle-class family running around the hood doing all this stuff.”
“That’s how I was feeling at the time,” Ritchie says now of the song. “That was a stressful time when my son was born. A white kid, not married, bringing home a half-Black kid to a Catholic well-to-do family.” Ritchie’s father struggled to adapt at first. “There were borderline things, like maybe using the n-word at times, but my son and my dad became best friends. People say that people can’t change. Yes, they fucking can.
Harmon recalls a conversation with Ritchie around this time about his change in artistic direction. “He straight-up told me, ‘I need to get back in touch with my whiteness,’” says Harmon. Gandy remembers Ritchie using the same phrase.The Detroit music scene during those years was small and felt a bit like a cultural backwater. Motown had long since decamped to California, and the city hadn’t produced a credible star in more than a decade.
Over the decade or so that followed, Ritchie seemed more enamored with the spectacle of politics than any particular issues. He met Clinton and performed at an inaugural event for Barack Obama. Even though he backed Mitt Romney, a fellow Michigander, in his bid to unseat Obama in 2012, when he saw Obama at the Kennedy Center Honors the following year, Ritchie said there were “no hard feelings.
Ritchie says he still believes this. “That thing’s more relevant now than when we made it,” he tells me between puffs on his cigar. “The message isn’t getting across.”“I’m part of the problem,” he acknowledges. “I’m one of the polarizing people, no question. Sometimes I bitch about other people, then I look in the mirror and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, why don’t you shut the fuck up too?’”“It’s a rich-guy issue,” he says. “No fucks left.
Ritchie insists there was no deeper intent than that. “I was using the Confederate flag because I love Lynyrd Skynyrd, and I think it just looks cool.”Ritchie performing in front of a Confederate flag at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 2004. “I never flew the flag with hate in my heart…. I love Black people,” he said in 2011.in Detroit, protesters marched outside, denouncing his association with the flag.
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.”with this magazine. “I’m digging Donald Trump,” he said in early 2016, before the Republican primaries had begun. “My feeling: Let the business guy run it like a business. And his campaign has been entertaining as shit.
Even as Ritchie grew more politically outspoken during Trump’s presidency, he’d nearly always kept politics off his albums. That ended with his 2022 release,On the blustery first single, “Don’t Tell Me How to Live” — a title that sums up his political philosophy as well as any — he rails against snowflakes, fake news, participation trophies, and easily-offended millennials.
Ritchie seems flattered that Trump has returned his affections. He rarely misses an opportunity to mention hanging out or golfing with the former president, and is quick to rise to his defense. When I bring up Trump’s divisive rhetoric about immigrants, about Democrats, about nearly anyone who crosses him, Ritchie embraces this aspect of his character as a feature, not a bug.
Ritchie can’t find the right cable to connect his phone to the studio’s sound system, so we go to a lounge area where he plays a couple of new country-tinged rock songs on his phone. This is about the point when shit starts going decidedly sideways. ME: When Trump gets up and talks about immigrants as rapists and animals, that creates an environment where the guy who came across the border running from violence or trying to support his family is now treated like shit.
It’s worth mentioning these are not the only times Ritchie drops the n-word during my visit. It’d be easy to label this as the rantings of a drunk racist, but as with everything that Ritchie does, it’s hard to know how calculated it all is.
He tells me that’s just business. If he can make “shit tons more money,” he can give it to friends, family, his band, and to the MD Anderson Cancer Center, which took care of his father when he was sick.“Finances make a lot of decisions.”
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