Grossroots 1: Kid Rock - Devil Without a Cause
I love music. I have fallen in and out of love with a lot of music as time has passed. So, every now and then I’ll revisit something I used to love just to shame myself. This is Grossroots.
Kid Rock’s Devil Without a Cause was the fifth CD I ever bought. I was 14, and I learned every lyric while probably only knowing what 20% of these lyrics meant (including 5% of "knowing”). Now, I’m 29 years old and am still unsure of 20% of the lyrics(1). I still know every word of this album, though. God help me, I will die knowing more Kid Rock lyrics than current world leaders. In 1998, it was a head-banging good time with big guitar riffs and raps about being better than everyone else. Also he had a rapping midget(2) in his entourage, which no one else in the nu metal game could claim. That’s a kind of realness no amount of middle fingers and power chords could buy.
In hindsight, nu metal might be the reason we have Men’s Rights Activists and #gamergate now. Times have changed, and a musical movement built around being angry at unspecified others for... being others has aged unbelievably poorly. It would be redundant to point out that a Kid Rock album in 1998 would be sexist and especially homophobic, given, well, Kid Rock in 2015, but it is. It’s a party album where if you’re not partying, you’re a faggot, and if you’re a woman, you’re probably fucking Kid Rock (and even if you’re fucking Kid Rock, you’re still a bitch!). Nine million CD buyers thought that this was a good kind of party.
Here’s a weird detail about that: Kid Rock actually mis-pronounces slurs on this album. First, in “Fist of Rage”, I think he says “Figgits”. In “Fuck Off” he pronounces it “Faygits”. In “Where U At?”, he makes an explicit reference to Ayn Rand. That’s not related to the slurs or pronunciation, but it’s pretty fitting that Kid Rock can make literary references while not correctly pronouncing the words he uses to insult people.
The most notable situation where this happens is on the final track, where he pronounces the “N” word a “nyainger.” I like to think Kid Rock wrote the line in a cocaine binge, thought “I’m Kid Rock(3)! I can say and do anything!”, then got to the recording studio and realized what he’d done mid-line. And then they kept it for the sake of iambic pentameter. I like to think Kids Rock just lives a life full of understanding and misusing literature.
Alsop, I keep hearing one lyric as “I got love for my honkies”, and I’m not even going to check up on that because the actual lyric is probably something more alarming.
On a more positive note: did you know that Kid Rock invented modern hip hop? It’s true. Third single/obligatory ballad “Only God Knows Why” tackles the following points:
Fame has isolated me and made me paranoid about my friends’ intentions.
It turns out a pile of money does not cure depression.
I will sing through a vocoder because sad emotions are alien to me, so I should sound like a sad alien robot on this song.
Replace “vocoder” with “autotune”, and you have the entire Drake discography a decade ahead of time. It’s ironic that Kid Rock has become more of a straight-ahead country singer in the decades since, because he absolutely deserves credit as a progenitor of one of the dominant trends in popular music. On the other hand, it’s good to see black artists steal from a white artist without attribution.
It would be too easy to cast stones at an album from a music genre that even its creator has outgrown, so I will say this: the music holds up. Strictly the music. The stuff that doesn’t involve words or Kid Rock’s generic flow. I bet an instrumental version of this album could mostly soundtrack a frat party while making people feel only vaguely threatened.
Some day there will be a TV show about a rock star as he lives through rapid social changes throughout a tumultuous decade in American history, and, it will be set in 1998 and starring a Kid Rock-esque character. It will be White Trash Mad Men but ending with a big, brash country music finale(4).
(I would very much watch that show.)
Footnotes:
It’s safe to assume they’re muddled metaphors for fucking, though.
I’m using “midget” because no way Kid Rock himself would use the preferred “little person”.
All impressions of Kid Rock should begin by shouting “I’m Kid Rock!” He says his own name enough to give you the sense he forgets occasionally.
In this analogy, Devil without a Cause is Kid Rock’s Kodak Carousel pitch. Pamela Anderson is his Megan Calvet. Scott Stapp is Ted Chaough.
