Kid Rock is Trending

I was as surprised as anybody else when I saw it. First, I feared the worse: could we have lost Kid Rock today? But then I remembered that if that was the case the hashtag would’ve been #RIPKidRock, and since it wasn’t I breathed a sigh of relief.

But then why on earth is Kid Rock trending?!

Upon further investigation I found out that there was a debate going on about the musical merits of Kid Rock, specially against those of Bruce Springsteen. Now, full disclosure, I haven’t listened to much from either of them. So I don’t really have a dog on this fight. However, scrolling down the comments I noticed something: this debate was about much more then music.

What the Hell?

Among the many arguments for and against Kid Rock, it is very apparent who is on which side of the debate: the most vitriol against Rock comes from accounts with pronouns in the bio, and those for him, tend to have American flags in their twitter profiles.

And here is where everything becomes significantly more or less interesting, depending on your point of view. Personally, I find it incredible that if you tell me someone’s position on climate change, gun control or abortion I can tell you with high accuracy whether they are defending Springsteen or Kid Rock right now on Twitter.

Dumbf***istan

The man from New Jersey vs the man from Michigan is just another incarnation of the same debate we’ve been having lately. It is possible to phrase it as left vs right, but I think in this case it is more significant to phrase it as The Coasts vs Flyover Country.

“Isn’t it the same thing?” you might ask. But in this scenario it really isn’t. Left vs Right in the United States is as old as the country itself. However, never have the Coasts elites – and many of its residents – demonstrated so much despise for everybody else in the country. And the rest of America for its part seems to never have felt their derision so keenly.

Much has been written about the economic difficulties of the region between the coasts. But that’s not even close to whole story. Just after the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush, SNL aired a TV Funhouse short animation called “Santa and the Red States”. In it Santa tells Rudolph that they have time to kill, since he won’t be delivering presents in the red states, aka, “Dumbf***istan”. And just in case that word was too subtle, they added Santa calling middle America “Bigots” and“Idiots”. To cap it all up, Santa tells Rudolph that it is ok because “(…) trailer parks don’t have chimneys anyway”.

This is just one of the countless jabs the entertainment industry has thrown at the people of Flyover country over the last 20 years.

Don’t get me wrong, the coasts have never been really right wing. But they also have never been as radicalized to the left as they are now.

In addition, they have become more comfortable then ever to openly express the full length of their absolute contempt for everything that’s not a mirror. “You don’t have a college degree? You don’t leave in the epicenter of a huge metropolitan area? Are there cows anywhere within a hundred miles from your home? Then you are absolute trash, and we will let you know it as often as we can.”

They can’t see the value of what is different, and are hopelessly convinced that they are the smart and open ones. So they relentlessly humiliate the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are fighting to survive everywhere outside the coasts.

The Americans who hold the “dumb” jobs that sustain virtually all life in America, including their own.

That starts to explain why so many in Flyover country felt so betrayed when The Boss Bruce Springsteen, the working-class hero, started to sing in unison with the Coastal elites.

Screengrab of a tweet

The man who once represented them revealed himself to be just one more voice in the entertainment industry that so viciously decries middle America. And that might be the reason why Kid Rock is now trending on twitter. Because regardless of the musical talents of either of them, only one of this too seems to still understand the struggle and the value of Flyover country.

And that is why Kid Rock is trending, and not Bruce Springsteen.