Kid Rock and Phallic Finger Rockets

Why the wokeism wars are making me sleepy

It’s a bird, it’s a penis, no, it’s Kid Rock!

When I was a third-grader at Mt. Olive Lutheran School, I learned the power of the f-word. Mind you, I didn’t actually know the f-word, or what it meant.  It was the late seventies – a more innocent time. Well, not for everybody.  If you took fistfuls of Quaaludes at your swinging key parties, I guess you weren’t all that innocent. But for me, an eight-year-old at a religious school, who didn’t have cable and whose parents wouldn’t even let him see Grease (Olivia Newton-John looked a little too saucy in those tight sharkskin pants), I was still pure as new snow.

That is, until I saw the f-word, scrawled on the wooden seat of one of those desks with the peninsula-shaped fiberboard tops at which we all had to sit. As one of the more middling students in my class, I sounded out the one-syllable word, and still mispronounced it. “Foooock” I said, with the long “oo” sound, like in “foosball,” the latter of which I was more proficient at than phonics. “It’s ‘fuck!’” said one of my worldly little friends, pronouncing it correctly. “And you’re not allowed to say it in school. It’s a really bad word.”

“No it’s not,” I said in disbelief.  I thought I was worldly, myself.  After all, I watched The Electric Company, and the word never came up in Morgan Freeman’s “Easy Reader” segment.  “Foock, foock, foock!” I said defiantly, still going with my preferred pronunciation.  “What does it mean? Doesn’t mean anything.”  I noticed several of the girls in my class uncomfortably stepping away from me. Then my teacher called me aside, instructing that I wasn’t to say that word.  It was a bad word for when a man and a woman really loved each other. Huh? I was still a little hazy on the definition. Also, he added, if I persisted in saying it, I’d be eligible for a good paddling. (It was the seventies in Texas, where corporal punishment was still not only tolerated, but celebrated.)

Of course, out on the playground at recess that day, I said it several more times. What can I tell you? I didn’t give a foock. 

Little did I know that my childhood insubordination would essentially foreshadow the Culture Wars of today. For I see a lot of Kid Rock in my earlier self. Or I see a lot of my earlier self in him, I should say. Kid Rock’s new single just dropped, if people still “drop” singles. (Apologies for my ignorance, but I’m getting old. Not unlike “Kid” Rock, who is about to turn 51, and who is really now more like Middle-Aged Rock.)

Rock – no relation to Chris – has just released a song, called, “Don’t Tell Me How To Live.”  It’s less a song, than an aspiring anti-snowflake anthem.  (In case it’s too subtle, snowflakes literally fall over walls of fire in the video.) One could see it, say, serving as a campaign theme song for a certain tangelo-flavored real estate developer should that person decide to run for president again. Mr. Rock supported Mr. Trump in both his presidential runs. Of course, Rock’s politics, like Trump’s (who switched party affiliations five times since 1987, before commandeering the Republican party), have been a tad schizophrenic over the years. Rock also once supported  the likes of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney, the senator from Bain Capital.  (Rock’s “Born Free” was even Romney’s 2012 campaign song.)  As with most of the faux populists of the present moment, consistency isn’t as paramount as is the volume-level of their declaration of solidarity.

And Rock is loud and proud about his.  Returning to his nu-metal roots of the late nineties after some country-flavored detours, he sets the pace in his spoken-word opener: Fuck all you hos/ Detroit til I die motherfucker/ Talking all that bullshit/ Ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live. In keeping with the spirit of our times, Rock sounds like he’s auditioning to get a podcast at the Daily Wire.

Some might think that Kid Rock has lost a step or two, as we all tend to do when the years stack up. Then again, he set the lyrical bar pretty low with his guilty-pleasure breakthrough (sorry, I liked it), back in 1998, “Bawitdaba,” the Gregorian-chant like refrain of which went:  Bawitdaba da bang a dang diggy diggy diggy said the boogie said up jump the boogie.  It was a song dedicated to All the crackheads, the critics, the cynics/And all my heroes in the methadone clinic.  As lyrical nuance goes, it wasn’t exactly Leonard Cohen.

But Mr. Rock knew of what he spoke, having grown up  on the hard streets of Macomb County, Michigan, the son of a parents who owned several car dealerships, who raised him in a 5,628-square-foot-home on a six-acre parcel complete with horses and an apple orchard, a property which sold for $1.29 million in 2019. (All his methadone-clinic heroes were likely not hanging out there, though if they were, they’d have had their choice of doing so in the large guest house, at the tennis court, or in the indoor Jacuzzi room.)

But whatever.  Despite his pedigree, Rock went on to visit all the stations of the white-trash cross:  He rarely wore sleeves. He got in a fight at the Waffle House.  He married Pamela Anderson for four months.  So his background  didn’t keep Kid  from speaking the language of the street – or of my own Mt. Olive Lutheran School in the seventies. I read his lyrics and watched his video multiple times for a good, clean f-word count.  If my lyrics transcription is correct, there are six “fucks” and five “motherfuckers,” aside from all the other lyrical goodness like: Bucka, bucka, you ain’t ever met a motherfucker like this/ Kiss my ass then you can suck a dick sideways/ My way or the highway, listen up/ Ain’t nothing changed here/  I still don’t give a fuck/ So what the fuck’s up with all the backlash/ You snowflakes, here’s a newsflash/ Ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live.

The video – which is more like a visual assault – contains many, many more visual f.u.’s. There is a kid holding up a middle-finger participation trophy. The number of birds flipped by Kid Rock: nine.  (Not including the imprinted bird-flip on the bottom of his shoe.) The number of birds flipped by other miscellaneous participants who tend to be heavily tattooed gents playing games of chance, downing shots, wearing MAGA hats,  arm-wrestling, or tending menacing pit bulls: six.  There’s at least two birds shot by Jon Harvey, Rock’s collaborator from the Canadian band Monster Truck. Harvey is a dead ringer for the late wrestler Bruiser Brody, and wears a pentagram shirt (QAnon might be unhappy, since they are on high-alert against the Satanic Elite). The video climaxes, so to speak, with Rock himself riding a giant middle-finger rocket that looks like an overgrown flesh-colored phallus,  as he sports black wings like a fallen Victoria’s Secret angel, while gripping a bottle of Jim Beam in one hand, and squeezing off shots from a gun in the other. (What he’s shooting at is anyone’s guess – birds? extraterrestrials? – as his penis rocket seems to be far out of range.)  Except when it releases what looks like a money shot of contrail while flying over Mount Rushmore, right on poor Thomas Jefferson’s head.

The lib backlash, of course, has been fierce.  One of the funniest songs and music videos I have ever seen, not intentionally so……..I’m so tough, watch my middle fingers!........That’s the goofiest guy I’ve ever seen…….Mommy and Daddy, I used the middle finger, am I brave?.......I said a bad word!........{On Rock rapping: “You’ll never tell me shit, you’ll never flip my script/Because I’m more outrageous than the Vegas strip”) But how outrageous? Like, Venetian outrageous? Or Treasure Island outrageous? (On Rock rapping: “I’m the last of the few still screaming ‘fuck you’”): Dude, everybody’s screaming it. I don’t know what you’re talking about. The left is screaming it. The right is screaming it.

And all the aforementioned, from a single episode of The Young Turks.  

Of course, the progressive meter maids at The Young Turks – a name employed loosely, not meant to literally pay homage to the Ottoman Empire’s hatchet men who committed the Armenian genocide, which could give a conscientious wokester  pause – also castigated Rock for promoting his “privilege,” exactly the kind of weenie-talk the song pushes back against.

But part of the problem with the modern Culture Wars is that it’s hard to tell who the weenies are anymore.  In Rock’s video, his Bruiser-Brody friend, Jon Harvey, almost hilariously keeps repeating the refrain: “Ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live.” As he snarls out the words, Harvey’s right nostril flares and curls, as if he both smelt it and dealt it, as we used to say back at Mt. Olive.

If you’re one of the two or three people who follow Canadian rock feuds, you’ll know that Harvey did not get a participation trophy for his Rock collaboration. As Loudwire reported, the Canadian rock trio Danko Jones went after Harvey, calling him a “piece of shit” and condemning him to “a lifetime membership in the douchebag hall of fame.” Harvey – who, as you’ll recall, was pretty insistent that he doesn’t want anyone telling him how to live - said, “I don’t know, man. I’m really hurt by that…..It’s super offensive. My mom’s gonna read that article.”

Harvey’s newfound sensitivity reminds me of a lyric – from “Don’t Tell Me How To Live” come to think of it!: Years ago, we all thought it was a joke, see?/ That every kid got a motherfucking trophy/ But yo homie, here’s the situation/ A nation of pussies is our next generation/ And these minions and their agendas/ Every opinion has a millennial offended/ ……. Get a clue, a crew, your fake news and views/Can all get the bottom of my motherfucking shoe/ I’m the last of a few still screaming fuck you.

Though as The Young Turks previously pointed out, Rock’s nowhere near the last. It is hard work, of course, staying edgy when these days, even church parishioners now essentially chant f-bombs from their pews.  But herein lies the tenor and crux of the modern Culture Wars.  Yes, the left has gone off the rails with wokeness, which used to be called “political correctness” about a half a second ago. When bad ideas fall out of fashion, they need a makeover and a relaunch, as noted by the always perceptive linguist John McWhorter, who calls it the “euphemism treadmill,” a term he admits lifting from Stephen Pinker, and which McWhorter defines as: “A well-used word or expression is subject to ridicule or has grimy associations. A new term is born to replace it and help push thought ahead. But after that term spends some time getting knocked around in the real world, the associations the old term had settle back down, like gnats, on the new one. Yet another term is needed. Repeat.”

Here’s hoping wokeism, or political correctness, or whatever we’re calling it five minutes from now is already in its death throes with its overreaching, victim-suckling, thought-policing, grievance-fabricating, and all around humorlessness. Neither am I suggesting that it isn’t a worthwhile endeavor, heckling the likes of Robin “White Fragility” DiAngelo, or Nikole “1619 Project” Hannah-Jones, or Ibram X. “Everything He Writes” Kendi.  It is! (Please don’t stop on my account.)

And yet, one can’t help but shake the feeling that if wokeness does die, the people who will be muffling the loudest graveside sobs are the likes of Kid Rock and his pals on the right who have now turned trolling from a pastime into a religion, keeping their fingers crossed that somebody – anybody! – will try to cancel them. Martyrdom has always been good for business. Meaning that Mr. Rock, despite his protestations to the contrary, is likely dying for someone to tell him how to live. His crappy song has only been up on YouTube since November 19, and already has over three million views. (A million of those likely coming from the hall monitors at Media Matters.)

With any luck for their respective record sales and fundraising arms, the two sides will keep practicing kafaybe, a pro wrestling term of art that old Bruiser Brody knew, defined by Oxford Languages as: “the factor or convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic.” Maybe the phoniness of it all is why the wokeness wars are making me sleepy.  When you have nothing to say (aside from “eff you”), the only thing that can make it seem important is when some speech gendarme tries to stop you from saying it. But that doesn’t make you combatants. Rather, it makes you codependents.

Bonus track: I’ve been hard on Mr. Rock.  But sometimes, he’s a white soul man, so I’ll leave you with one of his actual musical gems -  an off-the cuff and inebriated little number he did with living legend Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top (along with Guitar Moves host Matt Sweeney), singing Ike and Tina Turner’s  “Nutbush City Limits.” Also, I’m awarding additional points for Rock’s fly fishing shirt: