There is an element of gospel to this album's music, and yet the lyrics are still cheerfully hedonistic. It's not a classic album, the tracks are for the most part less memorable than 2003's self-titled album, and yet it's still an impressive Southern rock album from the Michigan singer-songwriter. He only raps on one track, "Sugar", and his rap fans by now probably lost interest. Yet the killer title track is one of his most impressive outings: His religion is sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, and he practices what he preaches. The imitation gospel sound is extremely over the top and the black girls singing "Testify!" is a great touch. It's got touches of
The Rolling Stones.
The older, maturing Kid Rock comes with some slow, soulful country rock/blues tunes on this album, like "Amen" and "Blue Jeans and a Rosary", which are extremely reflective and thoughtful; "Amen" in particular is reminiscent of
Bob Dylan, as Kid Rock tackles issues like poverty and racism ("this country's race relations got me feelin' guilty of being white", he sings, referencing the famous
Minor Threat punk song). Kid Rock at this point is a single father and in the aftermath of his divorce from Pamela Anderson, to which he disses on the country song "Half Your Age", sung by golfer/singer
John Daly.
Two tracks are covers:
David Allan Coe's "New Orleans" and the rock and roll track "Lowlife" originally by
John Eddie, which tongue-in-cheek boasts about the singer keeping
Ted Nugent's
Cat Scratch Fever in his 8-track, making black music for the white man, finding racist jokes funny and how he owes everybody money. The energetic arrangement makes it one of the album's highlights.
As the title implies, rock-n-roll dominates the set, so his hard rock fans might not find this one too engaging, either, with the only hard rock and heavy metal-influenced track on the album being the
Warrant-esque "So Hott", the most lyrically hedonistic on the album, and amother highlight with awesomely seedy lyrics like "You got a body like the devil and you smell like sex" and "I wanna *** you like I'm never gonna see you again".
But your scaling of love and hate on this album will depend on whether the radio hit "All Summer Long" makes you want to crank it up or change the station as his unnecessarily controversial tribute to
Lynyrd Skynyrd and
Warren Zevon got a lot of unnecessary flack for incorporating melodies from "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Werewolves of London" alongside a new original melody. The sound was Southern rock, but the approach, called mash-up, was rooted in Kid Rock's hip-hop DJ background. And it's a great mash-up. I'm not sure why the interpolation makes people mad when the whole point of the composition is that Werewolves and Alabama sound
exactly alike.
And the same hypocrites who hate on this song lavish mucho praise on Internet DJs who mash-up "Ghost Riders in the Sky" with "Riders on the Storm" or any of the other million mash-ups on YouTube made by people who didn't pay for the original tracks or write original melodies into the mash-up, and yet Kid Rock, who paid both Skynyrd and the Zevon estate, and also wrote an original melody and new lyrics, not to mention being a far better songwriter than Warren Zevon is crucified? Maybe he
is the Rock N Roll Jesus.
