Growing up, I had a friend who was very good at getting backstage at concerts. I’d tag along when and wherever she would have me. One night, she walked into a backstage area where Kid Rock was holding court, surrounded by young girls in compromising positions, like a low-rent rock star Renaissance painting.
She froze. Took it in. Then turned around and said, “Absolutely not,” and left.
We happily walked away from backstage passes because she was so grossed out by Kid Rock. Which, honestly, feels like a very accurate review of his entire career. If only the rest of the country walked away from Kid Rock.
And of course, now, this man is the face of the backlash brigade’s answer to the Super Bowl Halftime Show. The Maybe-They-Were-Born-With-It, Maybe-Its-MAGA-Face Halftime Show.
While Bad Bunny takes the actual Super Bowl Halftime Show as one of the biggest global superstars alive, a coalition of wannabe culture warriors has assembled an “alternative” halftime spectacle through Turning Point USA, featuring Kid Rock alongside mid-tier country acts Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett. Spoiler alert! The announced performers are all white.
And their selection to this dubious countercultural programming is not due any of them earning this moment. But because they are mad at someone else did. This is what happens when a movement that once preached meritocracy quietly abandons it in favor of grievance.
If you somehow missed it, Kid Rock made headlines in 2023 by posting a video of himself shooting cases of Bud Light with an automatic rifle after the brand partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. He wasn’t filming himself writing a song or offering anything resembling a cultural critique. He was shooting beer. What a man.
This was all framed as a brave stand for “real America,” a millionaire musician cosplaying as a culture warrior because a corporation dared acknowledge that a trans woman exists. It was less protest and more toddler tantrum with firearms.
And somehow, we are still told that women, queer people, and “wokeness” are the cause of this so-called crisis of angry men in America. It is always someone else’s fault. Always someone else’s existence that supposedly explains the rage. Never the fact that someone like Kid Rock, who grew up wealthy in a mansion and has more money than most people will ever see, is furious that a trans woman got paid by a beer company to do a harmless promotion.
And somehow, this national embarrassment became a rallying cry.
What makes the whole routine even funnier is that Kid Rock is not the salt-of-the-earth everyman he pretends to be. He grew up wealthy in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the son of a successful car dealership owner, raised on a sprawling property with horses and apple orchards. This is not a story of grit. It is a story of privilege wrapped in a fake southern drawl and sold as authenticity.
That hasn’t stopped him from positioning himself as the voice of the “real American,” while attacking artists who built global audiences through talent and cultural relevance. For decades, conservatives loved to talk about pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps hard work, excellence, and earning your place. Until someone they did not like earned it.
Bad Bunny is Spotify’s most-streamed artist globally. He sells out stadiums. He moves culture. He has reshaped music beyond language barriers. He also just made history as the first artist to win Album of the Year at the Grammys for a Spanish-language album. That is what merit looks like. And instead of meeting excellence with excellence, the response was to throw together a clown-car-on-fire halftime show built on resentment.
This is not an alternative born from creativity. It’s a petty grievance escapade wrapped in a flag, surrounded by men in makeup who rage against other men who wear makeup. A participation trophy for people upset by the celebration of any culture other than their own narrow-minded one.
Gilbert and Brice are perfectly fine country radio artists. Barrett is an industry manufactured breakout. None of them are halftime headliners by any serious cultural measure. They were not chosen because they represent the best of American music. They were chosen because they represent ideological alignment, which at least is fully transparent.
In today’s culture war economy, outrage is more valuable than excellence. You do not have to be great. You just have to be angry. And preferably angry about women who demand equal rights, Black and brown people with upward mobility, queer people, non-Christians, people who like sesame oil, people who don’t eat meat, people who believe in science, people who don’t like seeing other people murdered in broad daylight in American cities, people with empathy, people who read books, people who...too many to name. I digress.
Super Bowl halftime shows are supposed to be about fun, about shared spectacle, about artists who define moments. From Prince to Tom Petty to Beyoncé to Madonna to Shakira and J Lo, these were cultural events. This year will be no different.
On one screen there will be joy, talent, and global influence. On the other will be a grievance livestream for people who think an American singing in Spanish is an agenda. (The fact that so many still believe Puerto Rico is not part of the United States is also a harrowing state of affairs.) This sideshow is a musty sad place built around clinging to a shrinking past.
This Super Bowl offers a perfect split-screen of America.
On one side is a minority demanding equal billing on television, not because it earned it, but because it is terrified of becoming what it actually is: the smaller, fading view in this country. A group so afraid of pulling up their big boy and big girl pants and stepping into the future that it clings desperately to a dead past, even as that past slowly suffocates everything around it.
On the other side are the rest of us who understand something simple. The world moves forward. Cultures evolve. People share space. And if we want to survive together on this planet, we must move into the future together —not barricade ourselves in nostalgia and resentment.
The choice really is simple. Do we want to move into tomorrow and build something better?
Or do we want to bury ourselves in yesterday, slowly shrinking into irrelevance until we collapse under the weight of our own resentments?
Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness @thedeadbetties
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