Music, Record Reviews

Badwitdabad: Kid Rock, Rock N Roll Jesus

Posted by: detourmag on October 9, 2007 at 4:50 pm

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KID ROCK, Rock N Roll Jesus (Atlantic, 2007)

Kid Rock’s music should make tops come off. It should make cries of “Fuck Yeah!” resonate through cavernous rooms that flutter with smoldering bits of the $150,000 in C-notes he just detonated on stage. It should be fun in the way his best songs have always been, from the blatant East Coast rap composites of his early career to the kilowatt bingeing of Devil Without a Cause. But as he’s grown older, richer, or sicker of partying, the Kid has come down with a pretty severe case of the blahs. He’s transposed himself (or his persona) over so many of his guiding lights — Lynyrd Skynyrd, David Allen Coe, Merle Haggard, Bob Seger — that he’s been left without a center. He’s a hero whore in a fedora who will fight Tommy Lee in an alley but doesn’t seem willing to write with the gift of gab and flair for good-natured detriment that used to make his aping and excess forgivable and even endearing. Rock N Roll Jesus, his latest, wants to soundtrack the fun that his songs should. But at best it’s background party music, the sort of thing that wafts over from the bonfire down the beach, the one with lesser amounts of girls, booze, and BC bud. And that’s no place for the motherfuckin’ Kid to be.

Rockers like “So Hott” and the title track are formulaic and stale — they aren’t revivals of anything — and the mid-tempo, largely acoustic ballads not only sap the album’s energy, but bite from Kid’s influences with little tact and even less originality. “Amen” lifts Seger’s “You’ll Accompany Me” for its rote plea for tolerance; the sentiment is admirable, but Primal Scream did this kind of refried rock testament way, way better. Besides, “Amen” is on the same record as “Sugar,” which while questionable (”I fuck hot pussy ’til it’s cold,” “Kiss my Anglo-Saxon ass tonight!”) at least tries to revive the lovably careless, free-swinging Kid Rock of old. Who does he want to be? Does he even know anymore?

Jesus rolls along through “All Summer Long” (it mashes Warren Zevon into Skynyrd for a memory lane rocker that adds little to the formula but some pleasant regional flair), the brash but enjoyable “Don’t Tell Me U Love Me,” and a few more acoustic numbers that are obviously built to put Kid in the same category as his party-livin’ pal Kenny Chesney. But it’s not the calculated quality of these tracks that’s bothersome; it’s that whatever Rock-ness they have feels forced, like even he’s just playing along at this point. Rock N Roll Jesus does end on a hight note, however: with his lively, irascible cover of John Eddie’s “Lowlife (Living the Highlife),” Kid at least gives props to another hero who deserves it. That’s all he ever wanted to do with Seger, Coe, and the rest, even if by now he’s become a weirdly blah amalgam of all of them. — Johnny Loftus

Watch: “So Hott”
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