Kid Rock – All Summer Long

If you find yourself in stitches as you watch the current crop of Jim Beam, ‘The Bourbon’, ads on telly and know who the Crusty Demons are, then read on… cos do I have a music video for you. So drag yourself away from your 351 pickup, trim your mullet, polish your moccies, and come with me as we live the redneck dream.

All Summer Long has got ‘Bogan’ writ large across all four of its derivative minutes (Werewolves of London, anyone?). Kid Rock is back, and forget about any radical reinvention, rebranding, or remoulding, it’s simply Kid Rock… back… the weirdest musical mutation you’re ever likely to meet… the world’s foremost purveyor of redneck hip hop. I mean, boy, is this one peculiar cat. And for anyone who’s not had the pleasure, just imagine one of the Dukes of Hazzard boys crossed with Snoop Dogg, and you have a fair idea how plain odd Mr Rock actually is.

Saying all that, you can’t be too dismissive of a man who’s sold millions of records — he must be doing something right. And here he jacks straight into middle America’s penchant for misty-eyed nostalgia. So it’s time to head way back to 1989, slap on the fuzzy lens filter and start taking some ‘footage’. [“Roll tape.”]

The track catches up with a callow Kid Rock doppelganger as he gets clumsy-friendly with his first real girlfriend — an apple-pie, corn-fed, candy-yammed Jessica Simpson type. As mentioned, the year is 1989 and, as Kid so rightly points out, we ain’t had no Internet (“tell that to the kids of today and they simply won’t believe you”) and all you needed for fun was a bottle of Jim Beam, a ghetto blaster, a campfire and some raging hormones. Kid Rock was raised in Detroit so the venue for all this free ‘n’ easy, sun-drenched good-times and chilled tunes (the hillbilly anthem, Sweet Home Alabama, of course) was Lake Michigan. In fact, the young Rock even tries to get his young belle interested in fishing off the pier (nothing doing, she can’t stop herself doing an impromptu striptease/pole dance — “ah the innocence of youth”).

So there we have it, Rock and his dopey teenage buddies sloping about on the foreshore of a Great Lake — boys looking a bit stunned/sulky and the girls in their bikinis gyrating to Lynard Skynard. What could be better?

But that was then and this is most definitely now — some 20 years on Kid Rock’s life has altered irrevocably, as the All Summer Long clip so clearly demonstrates. For starters, he’s a rich musician. Sure, he still likes to hang out on the lake, but he’s a rich musician so he pilots his own timber-hulled, fantasy speed boat. And yes, despite that messy divorce, Rock still has an eye for the ladies, but these days he’s a rich musician, so they’re no longer jail bait and there are more chicks to choose from — I count at least 15 scantily-clad maidens on this music video’s houseboat. And, stop press, one of the ladies isn’t a blond-haired, blue-eyed, Miss Alabama contestant. In fact, she has brown curly hair and her skin is the colour of caffé latté — wow, I mean, Kid Rock has, like, really matured. — CH.