February 9, 2026 - 12:30pm
It’s time we finally admitted it: Kid Rock is the greatest prophet of our generation. Just over 35 years ago, in his 1990 single “Pimp of the Nation”, a young Bob Ritchie (the musician’s real name) peered into his crystal ball: “One day I’ll probably walk with a limp/ And drive a big Lincoln/ Wearing an unbuttoned shirt/ And be a 55-year-old pervert/ But for now rap’s the occupation/ But watch one day I’ll be Pimp Of The Nation.”
Now it’s 2026 and he’s 55-years-old, and he looked wobbly as he headlined the Turning Point USA alternative Super Bowl show yesterday. There, he stood before spectators as the undisputed Pimp of the Nation — not a kingmaker, not a statesman, but a MAGA court jester under the watch of a sitting US president.
The official NFL half-time show itself had been mired in controversy. Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny was the headliner, but in the run-up he had been critical of ICE raids sweeping the US. Donald Trump criticised the choice when it was announced, and called the performance terrible afterwards. TPUSA had set up an alternative with a more conservative bent. Brantley Gilbert and Lee Brice opened the show with some bro country, the latter mourning that “it ain’t easy being country in this country nowadays” because of woke culture. Mostly, they sounded like what they loved more than anything was drinking, but Lord knows the Democrats aren’t talking your beer away.
Alas, Kid Rock did not maintain his persona for too long. He turned down the amps and was reintroduced as just plain ’ol Bob Richie to sing a sombre country ballad which doubled as a literal come-to-Jesus moment. The lyrics wandered into proselytising about Christ and the Bible as a “book that needs dusting off”, a jarring transition from his previous song dedicated to “the hookers all trickin’ out in Hollywood”. The Right’s dark-hued counter-programming existed somewhere between a big-budget concert at a megachurch, a CMT award show in Nashville, and a wake for Charlie Kirk.
But this kind of cognitive dissonance may just be the air we breathe now. The only thing this half-time show proved is that the shifting terrain of the culture war eventually makes liars and hypocrites of us all. Just 30 years ago, Kid Rock was a profane rap-rock star whose breakout album Devil Without a Cause featured a song titled “F*ck Off” with a black-and-white Parental Advisory sticker, the cultural scarlet letter of the Clinton era. He was on the shortlist of MTV musicians which conservatives and religious watchdogs such as Focus on the Family treated as the face of a collapsing youth culture.
Fast-forward three decades, and the same demographic which once wanted to censor his lyrics is now cheering him on as the wholesome, patriotic antidote to the “degenerate” NFL. It’s now devout religious conservatives such as Franklin Graham who cheer him and suggest that, in American politics, “values” are often just “vibes” which depend on who is waving the flag the hardest.
It’s not just the Right which is showing this hypocrisy. On the other side of the aisle, ageing liberals find themselves desperately straining to remain “relevant” by championing whichever hyper-commercialised pop spectacle is dubbed anti-MAGA. Yesterday, I wandered into a downtown coffee shop offering a Bad Bunny latte to celebrate the Resistance, along with anti-ICE buttons.
Perhaps, though, if there is a silver lining to the immense amount of energy poured into this bathroom break of a four-hour football game, it’s that it all may have accidentally achieved a classic conservative victory. After a tedious half-time show bookended by a slog of a football game, perhaps the only winning move is to turn the television off entirely and revert to the conservatism of our grandparents, who thought almost all pop music and TV entertainment was rotting our brains.
If so, Kid Rock really is the Pimp of the Nation. He’s sold Americans exactly what they asked for: showing them that their mass culture has become plagued by hypocrites who will be used by either side of the political aisle for cheap point-scoring. In doing so, he might finally make us realise how much they’ve been overcharged for the experience.
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