Years ago I hurt a co-worker's feeling when I loudly opined that I preferred the earlier music of the band Chicago because its later years were dominated by Peter Cetera and I found his power ballads to be whiny and annoying. Of course my exact wording was more colorful, involving many variations of "sucks" and allusions to ear bleeding.
But he was a big fan, so my unsolicited thoughts were unkind and unnecessary. And the fact is that there was (and is) lots of music that I enjoy which is hardly defensible as objectively good. So I'm not here to disparage Kid Rock's music. If you like it, you like it. If you don't, you don't. Although, the line from his song "Cool, Daddy Cool" — Young ladies, young ladies, I like 'em underage see, Some say that's statutory (But I say it's mandatory) — is something I think we can all agree to openly dislike.
And it's not Rock himself that I necessarily have issues with. I've never met him. But he is an artist and a celebrity and lives a very public life freely sharing his opinions. So we are all free to have reactions to those opinions, especially the cruel and entitled ones.
Rock was born and raised in Michigan, a credential he has often commodified (especially when selling concert tickets here). But as demonstrated in the video he posted this past week on social media with a U.S. military helicopter hovering near his hilltop home, he has chosen to live in Tennessee. So I'll be very happy to have him be associated with Tennessee, not Michigan, from this point forward.
