11.19.12
Song from WhiteManistan
“Let’s Ride,” one of the lead singles from Kid Rock’s new album, Rebel Soul, due on Black Friday.
Essentially, it made me want to punch his teeth in. The lyrics stink, the riff/melody is good but not great, and the white guy rocker/country artist doing his knee-jerk tribute to guns, the military and the American flag provokes nausea. Much worse, hang around, Rock actually takes time to explain it at the end. It’s his effort to make a song for the troops when they’re riding out on search and destroy missions, which he calls “doing their job.”
Admitting you like it is just like saying you enjoyed Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Beret” as a serious tune, not unintended awful camp.
It wraps up many things wrong in WhiteManistan, condensed into stale ol’ classic rock lassitude. There’s the reverence for endless war as long as they, or we, don’t have to fight it, working the guilt off in silly gifts, in this case a tune by a rock star, for soldiers dispensing with the enemy, always less expensively armed and of different color and religion, somewhere else, not here.
No rockers signed up to fight after 9/11. And none have since although there’s been a decade and ample opportunity to do so.
Yet these kinds of tunes have become routine for the audience in WhiteManistan. The celebrities in pop rock and country are very keen on saluting the soldiers in words and melodies. Keep fighting, we think of you, thanks for all that you do.
While Kid Rock no doubt means well (he really, really loves the city of Detroit, Seventies America and Bob Seger), it’s also reflexive pandering. These are the things the white audience wants to hear, not what it needs to. Wounded and just barely surviving modern America, they’re convinced the bottom has fallen out because it has. They need their cultural comfort food plus the symbolic assignment, in song, of three Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition in penance to get the blemishes off the souls before Communion, too.
It deserves ridicule. Reinstating the draft would fix this wagon, but good. And what’s at all like a “Rebel Soul” about it, anyway?
Hat tip to Chuck Eddy for reviewing the album at Rhapsody, tipping me to it.