Day 8: "Devil Without A Cause" - Kid Rock (1998)
Here's today question. Can I bring myself to throw out a CD that I willingly bought?
You can listen to it here, but I wouldn't recommend it
I've got a complicated relationship with music. It's been a critical part of my life for as long as I can remember. I'm absolutely certain that 99% of the days of my life I have listened to at least 60 minutes of music that day, to the point where I start to get weirdly stressed out in situations when I find myself unable to do so (though thanks to the advent of the iPhone, those are few and far between now). As a result, the albums I own take on a kind of untouchable quality in some ways - this is music, why would I ever want less of it? What would bring me to say "nope, let's not have this any more" when having it costs me nothing?
But god damn I hate that I own this. I hate that I just spent another hour and eleven minutes of my life listening to it again. But most of all, I think I hate the fact that I didn't always hate this - in fact, at the time when I brought it, I thought Kid Rock was a Pretty Cool Guy.
Even the absolution of Tim Curry is not enough for me to forgive myself.
I like to think that I'm a smart enough person. I take pride in being able to consider how what I do, or say, or support, can affect other people that I know, or even people that I don't know. For all my cynicism about the state of society, I try as a rule to like people as much as possible, no matter who they are. And I'm aware that as a fan of Rap and Hip Hop, those genres come peppered with issues, in terms of the way homophobia, misogyny and racial slurs are used as part of that culture. It's a difficult circle to square, and even when I listen to modern Rap greats like Kendrick Lamaar or Drake or Chance The Rapper or Run The Jewels, I have to remind myself of the fact that I'm enjoying this music despite those elements, rather than because of them.
Kid Rock is the personification of the wrong attitude towards those things. He revels in them precisely because of the reaction he gets from people who think of it as dangerous and unnecessary. This is a guy who is running for Senate on a platform of just pissing off liberals, which is probably how a previously admittedly Pro Choice and Pro Legalisation candidate ended up getting a Republican Senate Nomination. He's a vacuous avatar of controversy and he makes my skin crawl, mainly because I have to confront either the option that he believes all the things he says and cares only for a small part of the human race because he's ignorant, or he's actively aligning himself with those ideals to make money, and he's an evil fuck.
The only reason I own this album is because of this man:-
The man who broke six thousand guitars and never drew a dime.
That is professional wrestler Jeff Jarrett, who Alex had a weird, post-ironic love of despite him being an average-to-terrible wrestler with a massively inflated sense of his own importance. However, he did use an instrumental version of the song "Cowboy" off this album which I really liked as his theme music. So I bought the album, and listened to it, and 20 year old me unironically enjoyed 14 almost identical tracks about how Kid Rock is the best at sex, has sex with all the women, and drinks so much you guys like you wouldn't even believe.
It's not even a good record musically! Every part of it, from the lyrics, the music, the tone, the message, even the cover art is a smug picture of a prick in a stupid hat. Listening to this was like scratching at my gums with a toothpick for 70 minutes.
But I still don't think I can bring myself to throw it away.
I'm never, ever going to play it again, realistically. I hate it and everything it stands for, it actively makes me unhappy it's part of my record collection. But maybe that's the point. Maybe I have to keep it, like some kind of badge of shame that says to people "No matter how smart or caring or in touch you think you are, you too might have owned and unironically enjoyed a Kid Rock album in the past".
