Here’s the thing about Kid Rock, who headlined Minneapolis’ Target Center Saturday night. He’s a much more complex guy than his public persona as a sleazy rapping rocker with a mouth as filthy as it is loud might suggest.
The man born Robert James Ritchie grew up in a wealthy family in suburban Detroit. After failing to establish himself nationally as a straightforward hip-hop artist with his 1990 debut album, Kid Rock began incorporating rock elements to his music and, with his fourth album “Devil Without a Cause,” broke through in a major way. The smash singles “Bawitdaba” and “Cowboy” helped the record top 10 million in sales and earned him two Grammy nominations.
From there, Kid Rock further expanded his sound to incorporate country and Southern rock flourishes with the help of his terrific band Twisted Brown Trucker. All the while, he maintained the image of a hard-drinking, harder-smoking pimp superstar who you could still imagine catching a beer with at the nearest dive bar.
But for all his abundant bluster of Kid Rock, those who call the guy Bob paint a much different picture. From the start, Twisted Brown Trucker has been the definition of a DEI band. Perhaps influenced by Sly Stone’s the Family Stone or Prince’s the Revolution, Kid Rock has long performed backed by a racially and sexually diverse group of musicians.
His drummer since 1997, Stefanie Eulinberg, is a Black lesbian. Guitarist Shannon Curfman, who joined in 2010, described herself as a “bi or pan(sexual) person” in a recent interview with the Star Tribune that, according to Curfman, was the first time she publicly discussed her boss in the media. (Curfman is a North Dakota native who moved to Minneapolis as a teen to pursue a career as a blues guitarist. She now lives in Andover.)
Kid Rock maintains that he is a libertarian with liberal views on social issues and conservative views on economics. At various points in his career, he supported Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Ben Carson.
But over the past decade, Kid Rock’s politics have hardened to resemble that specific strain of Donald Trump followers who trade in hateful speech, seething anger and unflinching support of the current president. A great example is that time, in April 2023, he posted a video to Instagram showing him shooting cases of Bud Light with a submachine gun after the beer company collaborated with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
In 2019, the Detroit News published an opinion piece complaining that instead of getting attention for his music, “Rock now makes news with his mouth, going on unprompted rants and attacking without being provoked.” In the aforementioned interview, Curfman said Rock “loves conversing. He loves learning. He will have a conversation with anyone at any time about politics” but that he became “so polarizing and so outspoken” during the pandemic.
Saturday was my sixth time seeing him and, in the past, I’ve had nothing but praise for the guy, whether he was playing to full houses or half empty arenas. When he sold out the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand in 2009 with Lynyrd Skynyrd, I wrote that his “true strength lies in his ability to distill various forms of rebel music — rock, country and hip-hop — into songs that sound like old friends, even on first listen. Also vital is the undeniable charisma it takes to play such an over-the-top character without lapsing into obnoxiousness.”
In 2013, he played a pair of shows — one at St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center and the other at the Fargodome — with his longtime hero and fellow Michigander Bob Seger. They each delivered wildly entertaining sets and then joined forces for an encore of Seger’s “Night Moves” and “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” and Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” and “Forever.” To this day, I still remember just how fun — joyful, even — the night was, from the enthusiastic crowd to the obvious chemistry between the co-headliners.
Twelve years later, well, things have changed.
New gruffness
To his credit, the 54-year-old Kid Rock remains limber as ever and did plenty of jumping and running around the stage. But gone was any of the old wink and smile he’d serve up on stage or those knowing glances that said he was in on the joke. Perhaps because his voice has deepened and gotten raspier, he often seemed to radiate a certain newfound anger. It simply wasn’t nearly as fun as Kid Rock shows used to be.
After opening with “Devil Without a Cause,” Kid Rock disappeared backstage (as he did after nearly every song) while a video montage of Kid Rock being defiant played on the big screens. During “You Never Met a M———– Quite Like Me,” the screens flickered with snapshots of him flipping the bird.
The crowd loved the hits like “Cowboy” and “All Summer Long,” but seemed much less interested in the newer material. The stuff from his most recent album, 2022’s “Bad Reputation,” fell particularly flat. It’s probably because no one in the house had heard it. His previous eight records all landed in the Top 10, while this one peaked at No. 124. And the title track came off like a free AI app attempting to write a bluesy rock song, although it was cute when Kid Rock played an alto sax solo and then handed it off to a 10-year-old to share with his younger brother. (Then again, who brings kids to a Kid Rock concert?)
The new gruffness in his voice worked on some songs, but definitely not all of them. He sounded particularly rough on his 2002 smash “Picture,” originally a duet with Sheryl Crow. Saturday, he sang it with the newest member of Twisted Brown Trucker, “The Voice” vet Kat Perkins, another North Dakota native turned Minnesotan who joined the band in 2022. She sounded so much better than he did, even if her voice was buried lower in the mix. And it did look like Perkins as well as Curfman were enjoying themselves.
But Kid Rock looked distracted throughout and a late-in-set bit where he took turns at the turntables, drums and guitar while covering a series of songs like Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious” dragged on far too long.
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Kid Rock wrapped the main set with “Born Free,” which he opened with a pre-recorded tribute to the military that played up the idea that patriotism isn’t partisan. Then he opened the encore with a clip of Trump lavishing Kid Rock with praise and calling his band the most patriotic in the world.
From there he launched into 2022’s “We the People,” a jaw droppingly awful collection of dusty MAGA grievances set to music. In it, he attacks mainstream and social media, Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, COVID restrictions and mask wearing, with matching images screened behind him including a brief photo of Tim Walz. At one point he sang “We all bleed red, brother, listen to me. It’s time for love and unity” in a song with a “Let’s go Brandon” chant in the chorus. It was all so charmless and divisive, even Trump himself might tell Kid Rock to tone it down.
