Songoftheday 3/22/22 - I've been sitting here trying to find myself, I get behind myself I need to rewind myself...

 

 

"Only God Knows Why" - Kid Rock

from the album Devil Without A Cause (1998)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #19 (two weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 12

 

Oh, man.

 

I knew the day would have to come that I would have to cover this cretin. Thankfully this living cold sore only made the top-40 three times, so there's that. But the timing of this with his sit-down comrade-fest with fascist Nazi Tucker Carlson is weird.

 

Sooooo.

 

Today's song comes from Robert James Ritchie, the rich son of a local Michigan car dealership magnate that decided that he loved the hip-hop in his McMansion in the far suburbs of Detroit. Dubbing himself "Kid Rock", he came under the wing of DJ/producer Derrick "D-Nice" Jones of the seminal rap group Boogie Down Productions, who helped him sign with Jive Records in the late 1980's. He released his debut album Grits Sandwiches For Breakfast in 1990, which I'm positive is something he has never ate or had his butler make, and while supposedly it sold a bit locally, it got zippo national attention. This, along with the inevitable comparisons to the newly-bigtime Robert "Vanilla Ice" Van Winkle which waned as fast as it came, caused Jive to drop Kid Rock like a lead balloon (what's with these early-90s rap poseurs eventually becoming cult icons?). He went on to record and release two more full-length albums and and EP of material independently that got ignored nationally just the same. 

Wanting to be signed by a major again, Ritchie changed his sound to be more rock, well the trailer-trash pastiche of rock, and got signed to Atlantic Records' Lava label, where he recorded his next album Devil Without A Cause, which came out in the summer of 1998. The first single released from the record was "Welcome 2 The Party (Ode To The Old School)", which was the most "hip-hop" appropriating track on the album, and the frat-boy try to ape the Beastie Boys stiffed (as it should). The second song released was a rehash of a track from his indie days, "I Am The Bullgod", which originally was on his 1993 album The Polyfuze Method. Re-recorded with crashing guitars, it found a home on hard rock radio, placing at #31 on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock airplay chart. 

Seeing a trend, Ritchie followed the hard rock route, with the next offering to radio the song "Bawitdaba". Ripping off the rap hook from the Sugarhill Gang's hip-hop classic "Rapper's Delight", adding a ton of guitars, and using the same call-out methods the big rappers were using, the track took on a life of its own reaching #10 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, #11 on the Mainstream Rock format list, and "bubbling under" the main pop Hot 100 at #104. And this time MTV was all over it as a cross-marketing tool. The track ended up earning a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance, thankfully losing out to Metallica's "Whiskey In A Jar".

The next single from Devil Without A Cause was "Cowboy", which is I guess the dinosaur of the plethora of country-rap redneck posturing that's infected the music scene today. Again MTV latched on, and so did rock radio, making the top ten on both the Alternative (#5) and Mainstream (#10) Rock radio charts, while scoring his first Hot 100 appearance at #82. 

All this new exposure set Ritchie up for his "crossover" to mainstream radio moment, which happened with the ballad from the album. "Only God Knows Why", written by Kid Rock with friend/collaborator Matt "Uncle Kracker" Shafer (who will eventually find himself on this series) and producer John Travis. Recreating the western-themed power-ballad that made many a glam metal band bank back in the early 1990s, they put his voice through a weird auto-tune filter to try to put him on pitch as he paints himself as a rough and tumble outlaw, and not the trust fund baby he is. If it wasn't for this horrid vocal processing, I'd say the record was well-put together, but the drone just works like a vocal fry that's just as annoying as his greasy hair. Nevertheless, most of America (including me at the time) didn't know the true backstory, and this time mainstream station got a chance to grab a hold of his viral success in a watered down form....

"Only God Knows Why" became Kid Rock's first top-40 pop hit on the Hot 100 in April of 2000. The song again placed on both the Mainstream (#5) and Alternative (#13) Rock radio charts. This time, though, the tracked made it to the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format, where it spent a half year on the chart with a high of #23. Internationally, the single went to #13 in Canada and #96 in Germany. Earlier that year, Kid Rock was also nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys, which went home with Christina Aguilera. The Devil Without A Cause album, originally released in August of 1998, finally made the Billboard 200 sales tally in January of the following year, and eventually made it to #4, spending over two years on the chart and selling over eleven million copies.

A sixth song from the record promoted to radio, "Wasting Time", tried to sell a brighter song that's more uptempo, but only managed to get to #35 on the Mainstream Rock chart as the market was then flooded with nu-metal alternatives. He will be back to the series. Ugh. With one of my favorite artists even. Double ugh.

(5/10)

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Here's Kid Rock performing the song in concert in 2001....

Up tomorrow: The late diva has her educational final hit.