Kid Rock's Rock Discography Is Full Of Flop Songs

Kid Rock doesn't exactly make it hard to make fun of him. Ever since the rap-country rocker caught the public's ear with "Bawitdaba" off of 1998's "Devil Without a Cause," he has been the easiest musician to accuse of writing trashy, terrible, low-effort, low-skill garbage that boosts his wife-beater-wearing image as much as it degrades listeners' intelligence. But not all of his songs are bad, right? Well, some of them are. Okay, lots of them are — Kid Rock's discography is flush full of flops mixed with occasional hits.

Case in point: Kid Rock released three entire albums before "Devil Without a Cause," from 1990 to 1996. Kid Rock diehards (there's bound to be a few) might know this, but what about the rest of us? Exactly. That means three albums' worth of commercial flops. And "Bawitdaba"? No matter that it got Kid Rock on the map, and no matter that its album sold over 11 million copies — the song never breached the Billboard Hot 100. At the same time, nine of Kid Rock's albums have made it to the Top 10 in the Billboard 200. The highest of these was 2007's "Rock n Roll Jesus" (No. 1), while his highest song was the 2002 Sheryl Crow/Allison Moorer duet, "Picture" (No. 4). All in all, this extremely odd chart composition points to Kid Rock's flash-in-the-pan fame and staunch, core fan base. Indeed, he's got over 6 million monthly listeners on Spotify. 

But alas, Kid Rock produced more songs that failed to chart or make an impression on fans. From his early "Black Chick, White Guy" to mid-career schmaltzfests like "Amen" and the recent, profoundly terrible "Don't Tell Me How to Live," each era of Rock's discography is littered with garbage. Here are the worst offenders.

Because Kid Rock's first few albums went nowhere, we could potentially choose any song off them for this article. But "Black Chick, White Guy" presents a unique case. Kid Rock fans might recognize the track from his 1998 breakout record, "Devil Without a Cause." But the song actually dates to 1996's "Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp," a pre-fame album released on Rock's own Top Dog Records (a label that later became embroiled in lawsuits over its ownership).

So why was this track copy-pasted onto "Devil Without a Cause"? No clue. What was its unique merit? No clue. Was it a massive non-single sleeper hit along the lines of Led Zeppelin's masterpiece, "Stairway to Heaven" (and its legendary Jimmy Page solo)? Definitely not. It did little on "Devil Without a Cause" except earn 2.3 million current listens as a combo track with "I Am the Bullgod." That's from an album that went platinum over 11 times and on which the biggest track, "Bawitdaba," has around 172 million current listens. 

Ah yes, but there's the lawsuit. As it turns out, Kid Rock might have included "Black Chick, White Guy" on "Devil Without a Cause" as his version of an autobiographical tale that described his tangled life, with lines like, "His d*** was metal, her p**** was a magnet." The, uh ... "Black chick" in "Black Chick, White Guy" (and mother of Kid Rock's son, Kelley Russell) said that the song refers to her and contains "several graphic, inflammatory, untrue, hurtful remarks," as Pollstar quotes. Perhaps she was thinking of the magnet line. Either way, this song didn't exactly do anything for Rock except live on in infamy.

Kid Rock followed up the commercial success of "Devil Without a Cause" with a couple of "ock" albums in quick succession: "History of Rock" (2000) and "Cocky" (2001). Sales-wise, they both did worse than "Devil Without a Cause" — 2.2 million and 5.7 million, respectively — and presaged further future flops from the artist. And while neither album nor any of Rock's other albums have exactly been critical darlings, we're going to give our nod to "Cocky" (the song from the album of the same name) for being the paltriest of paltry follow-ups to Kid Rock's initial, late '90s rap-rock boom.  

With "Cocky," Kid Rock established a few things: 1) He was already running out of musical ideas besides "I'm awesome," 2) He only had one rap flow, ever, and, 3) The success of "Bawitdaba" and its preschool-level riffs was a fluke of the Korn-led nu-metal zeitgeist. It's not that "Cocky" did poorly in comparison to other artists — it still has around 51 million listens on Spotify. But as a follow-up to massive success, it did poorly, especially in comparison to the album's biggest song, "Picture," which required Sheryl Crow to prop it up and carry Rock into the highest Billboard Hot 100 position of his career, No. 4. "Picture" is also Rock's second-highest number of listens on Spotify, at about 255 million. But its generic country ballad stylings weren't even Kid Rock's shtick at that point. 

"Cocky" is a rap-rock track, which was Kid Rock's thing, and it underperformed. The lyrics and music are uninspired and stupid, even by his standards. Bars include, "Holding shares cool like Fonzie / Rolling Lake St. Clair in my forty-foot Donzie." Such groan-worthy lines might illustrate why the song never caught on.

With 2007's "Rock N Roll Jesus," Kid Rock started leaning heavily into his "I'm repping all the hillbillies" country music phase. We can consider the album's biggest hit, "All Summer Long" (his most listened-to song on Spotify at around 615 million), to be a creative flop because it sampled its best bits from "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Werewolves of London." But it's "Amen" that wins our floppiest flop award, a song that Kid Rock on The Boot called, "The best song I've ever written."

Lyrically, "Amen" is on the nose but actually comes across as fairly sincere, with lines like, "Stop pointin' fingers and take some blame / Pull your future away from the flame / Open up your mind and start to live / Stop short-changin' your neighbors." Yes, the song's themes are tired and amount to, "The system is bad, religion is bad, war is bad, and we've got to fix society." But it's the music and the presentation that kill the song's sincerity, as they're abject lessons in how far you can push/milk an emotionally manipulative presentation for cash. Schmaltzy and self-indulgent with a limp pop-rock acoustic composition and a video showing coffins covered in American flags: "Amen" is an AI-written Kid Rock song before AI could write songs.

Judging by the Billboard Hot 100 history, the public was more interested in hearing Kid Rock sample Lynyrd Skynyrd and Warren Zevon, as "All Summer Long" reached No. 23 on the chart, but "Amen" was nowhere to be found. It did reach No. 11 on the Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, though, but that might be more of an insult than anything else.

By the time we get to Kid Rock's 2017 album, "Sweet Southern Sugar," basically everything he did was a flop. Eighteen weeks after its release, the album had only sold about 145,000 copies. Kid Rock had also fully deteriorated into his country phase, producing works that function as marvelous self-parody, especially "Po-Dunk" and its usury of Deep South stereotypes. And while "Grandpa's Jam" defecates the worst lyric in Rock's entire discography — "And I f*** you in your ass quick with Taylor Swift's d***" — it's "American Rock 'n Roll" that's the most disappointing flop overall.

Basically, it's like this: "American Rock 'n Roll" killed any Kid Rock fan's final hope that he'd return to the harder, gutsier (not good, just gutsier), OG "Devil Without a Cause"-era music. Despite the title, "American Rock 'n Roll" isn't a rock song, isn't a mixed genre song, and isn't anything at all but the most bland, tepid, mid-tempo, copy-pasted country ballad that sounds indistinguishable from 10,000 others cut from the same mold. If you weren't told that it was a Kid Rock song, you'd never be able to tell. And if it wasn't a Kid Rock song, you'd never hear it to begin with because it's too bereft of creativity or verve to be released.

Admittedly, some critics took well to "Sweet Southern Sugar." AP News called it "a darn good album" but also called "American Rock 'n Roll" one of the album's "satisfying arena-ready rockers," indicating a total lack of understanding regarding what "arena-ready rockers" are. Besides, we already mentioned the poor album sales, which reflect fans' opinions. So does the song's absence in Rock's top 10 most listened-to Spotify tracks.

Now we come to the worst of the worst flops, which happens to be a track from Kid Rock's most recent musical effort, "Don't Tell Me How To Live" from 2022's accurately named "Bad Reputation." Fans (or at least the Kid Rock-curious) on Reddit have decreed "Bad Reputation" the star's worst album. We're calling out "Don't Tell Me How to Live" as the worst of its tracks, which is a pretty high bar.

Everything about "Don't Tell Me How to Live" is gutter-level godawful. The song's got a combative lyrical opening that sounds lifted from the inner monologue of an angsty teenager but actually came from the pen of a 50-something celebrity worth $150 million: "F*** all you hoes! / Detroit 'til I die, motherf*****!/ Talkin' all that bulls***! / Ain't nobody gonna tell me how to live!" (side note: Kid Rock lives in Nashville — in a replica of the White House, no less). The song's got Kid Rock's one, regurgitated rap flow delivered atop a honky tonk-laced riff. It's also got a music video that functions like a grab bag of dive bar biker stereotypes plus a rocket that lifts off from Mount Rushmore because America. If it was satire, it'd be brilliant. As a sincere work, it's cringe to the power of infinity.   

Perhaps sadder than anything, the song also grasps for Kid Rock's "Devil Without a Cause" glory days and then promptly botches the attempt with dreadful lyrics: "Bucka bucka, you ain't never met a motherf***** like this / Kiss my a**, then you can suck a d*** / Sideways." Blessedly, "Bad Reputation" debuted absent from the Billboard 200.