American Dick: Kid Rock Brings His Cheap Date Tour to Coral Sky

He doesn’t give a good goddamn that civil rights activists from his home state (it’s Michigan, btw) asked him to distance himself from the Confederate flag after the tragic, race-motivated shooting in South Carolina fueled an uproar against the relic. Nope. He simply hit up Megyn Kelly at Fox News to tell the National Action Network to “kiss my ass.” He considers his allegiance to it an homage, if you will, to Southern rockers.

Oddly enough, the cripplingly untrustworthy news station revealed something interesting about the self-proclaimed American Bad Ass. His son is mixed race. The Detroit Free Press even mentioned that Kid Rock was presented with the Great Expectations Award from the city’s NAACP branch in 2011.

But nobody ever said Kid Rock made sense. This is a man who married sex bomb Pamela Anderson and later assaulted Tommy Lee at the MTV Video Music Awards. This dude appeared in a sex tape with Creed’s Scott Stapp (not having sex with each other, but whatever). Most importantly though, this is the guy who somehow combined and then popularized the three most disparate of this nation’s musical genres: country, nu-metal, and hip-hop.

Maybe he really is an "American Bad Ass"? He hooked one of the United States’ most loyal fan bases and kept them partying to the sounds they love, even if none of them intuitively jive. And to keep ‘em coming back, Rock took a pay cut and started charging only $20 at each show starting with his 2013 Best Night Ever summer tour. A man of tradition (see above), he continued with this discount on his current Cheap Date tour with Foreigner.

He’s promoting his newest release, First Kiss, the title track of which sounds way more like Bruce Springsteen-lite than “Bawitdaba.” But Rock is a grandfather now, and after that populist move of charging twenty bones per show, maybe the ‘Murica he’ll be repping soon is that of the Boss. Unlikely.

It doesn’t seem Kid Rock will ever budge on his loud-mouthed, stubborn style for anyone, not even the NAACP in a time of national crisis. He’s just got that kind of Rebel Soul.

Kid Rock's First Kiss: Cheap Date Tour, with Foreigner. 6:45 p.m., Thursday, July 16, at Coral Sky Amphitheatre, 601-7 Sansburys Way, West Palm Beach. Tickets cost $20 via ticketmaster.com.