ENTERTAINMENT
Can we get some new material please?
May 15th, 2006
Guess who had another concert? Yep, that kid that everyone wants to claim they are personal friends with, good ol’ Bob Ritchie. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been listening to this guy since he used to DJ at the Shelter and sell his tapes out of a shoe-box for $5; I used to think he was one of the greatest entertainers of our time, this was before he toured for four years straight with the same exact show. Come on Mr. Ritchie, get some new material already!
The first time he toured with this last album of his, Cocky, I thought it was a great show. He still incorporated a few things from his Devil Without a Cause tour, but hey, don’t change too much right away. Now after you release a Live album two years into the SAME tour you have been touring the world with, do you need to go on another tour for the same thing? Sort of redundant isn’t it? At least when he toured with the Devil Without a Cause tour, he did an entire on-core of hits from his original 3 albums, the ones most people don’t even know existed. What happened to the good OLD stuff? Where is the Pimp of the Nation, how about Balls in your Mouth, what ever happened to Wax the Booty (one of the best songs ever), or Yo-Da-Lin in the Valley, where are all these classics that got you started? Why not mix in some of the old stuff, the classic stuff and remind this younger generation (maybe this older generation by the crowd at your last concert) that you at one time were more Rap, then you were Top 40.
Before Mr. Rock could be played on every radio station from Country to Top 40 to the Rock-N- Roll stations, he produced 3 albums that no station would touch. Think Eminem, but with a good beat and some better lyrics and not the depression problems, more dance and fun stuff. The kind of stuff that your Mom would scold you for if she heard you listening to, the kind of stuff that was played at every field party while I was in High School. Before there was I Want to be a Cowboy there was The Polyfuse Method and Desperate-Rado; these were some serious rhymes sampled with some serious mixes. Mr. Ritchie always had a way of sampling the old stuff, yet still complimenting it. Sort of the way Kanye West does today (who noticed that the song Gold Digger starts with a fantastic sampling of Ray Charles’ - I Got A Woman). He brought the old Blues, Country, Southern Rock into this new Rap style of music and sort of created a new category of music. You had trouble labeling it, and this is what a lot of people were afraid of, they had no idea what to call it? Was it Dance, was it Gangsta, or was it Top 40; it was all that mixed into one, sort of a new style of music that he was creating by himself. There is a reason that he is where he is today, and I’m not knocking him for it, I just know that I am sick of hearing the same shit; come out with something new to WOW us with.
He keeps teasing us with all these renditions of the same music just sung a different way, I want to hear new music sung any way you want to sing it, as long as its NEW! I want to go see you where you don’t ask us what your name is one hundred times in a row! That was fine when you first blew up and most of the people seeing you in concert was for the first time, but now that you are a house-hold name, you can stop asking us what your name is. We all know that you can play every instrument on your stage, you proved this to us in the Devil Without a Cause tour, show us some new stuff, although Jenna Jameson was nice. We all know that you can scratch and mix on the turn tables like the best of the best, so show us something different. And I’m a little disappointed that your current DJ sings half your lyrics now. What’s up with that?
Now before we get flooded with emails from all you loyal Kid Rock wanna be’s, all you people who only know Bob for his last two albums, I say TWO, because the two he put out in between these two were a Live album and a Best Of (I don’t consider those new albums), remember that I am a huge Kid Rock fan. I still have somewhere in my possession my first Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast CD! I can still sing every word to Super Rhyme Maker, and I still listen to Early Mornin Stone Pimp or E.S.M.P. as it was known. My favorite song of all time is Last Stand in Open Country (a duet with Kid Rock and Willie Nelson). My favorite concert was at the State Theater when he filmed the video for Devil Without a Cause and the upper balcony where I was standing was bouncing about five to eight inches from the place jumping up and down. I still reminisce about sitting in the visitor’s locker room back stage at COBO for a late night sing-along. He was playing acoustic with Uncle Cracker, and only a handful of close friends and we all were sitting around singing old Hank Williams and Lynard Skynard songs while drinking Coors Lights. Believe me, I am a HUGE fan, I just want some new material to add to the already big collection.
When he released Cocky and everyone bitched about him selling out because he had gone country, I was right there saying its just his way of showing us how versatile he is. Just show us some new stuff, and stop asking us to shout your name.
And by the way, 90% of the websites I found said that either Devil without a Cause or Polyfuse Method was his first album?! For all of you fans who think you know it all, here is the order they came out in. Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast was the first, followed by Back From the Dead, then E.M.S.P. then Polyfuse Method and then if he ever sold out, he did it here by making an album for radio with Devil Without a Cause and the rest is history. Mr. Rock himself doesn’t even list the albums in this order on his website? But believe me this is the way they were released, I have them all.
Found this on the internet while looking something up:
10/12/2001 - Kid Rock told LAUNCH to expect this album to be different from his previous one, saying he's interested in moving away from the rap/rock genre. "It wasn't like I was trying to put styles together to create something different because even the whole rock/rap thing, I feel it can be a fad," he said. "I can see it being maybe a fad and having a little run, and I don't want to get caught in that. I haven't got caught in a fad in eight years, I don't plan to start now. Since I always want to use the styles and influences around me to make the best music I can, and it might grow into something different the next record. I hope it does. I don't want to make the same record again, I never have and I never will."
– Pat Bonish
pat@stldmag.com
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