Right now their boombox blares “No Woman, No Cry,” turned up to drown out the hotel’s Eurodisco. Days mostly involve drinking around the pool. Kid Rock and his band are in Jamaica to play a lucrative spring-break show (partly organized, as it happens, by Rolling Stone), but they have taken the opportunity to enjoy a week’s rest in the sun. “Will you take a picture with me?” she asks. It also takes about ninety seconds for him to be approached by a hotel guest. It takes about ninety seconds ashore for him to start talking of his sea adventure as a funny story about something that happened once. I fucking hurled, man,” Kid Rock chuckles. Isn’t that what everything is the right reason for? What are the right reasons to open an escort service?ĪThere’s no deep thought process behind it. Questions occasioned by puzzling or provocative moments in the Kid Rock lyrical canon, Number One : Though he is the only one to need the bucket, most of us are feeling rough, and no one says much until we clamber ashore. Then he reaches for a plastic bucket and begins vomiting. After twenty minutes, Kid Rock gestures to the crew. Now he is simply holding on, and his fingers desperately grip for a kind of control the armrests can’t supply. When he first sat down, Kid Rock was holding the armrests with the assurance he brings to most actions, large or small, as though it were the armrests’ privilege to be supporting his forearms.

Up and down, up and down, the boat pushes through the waves. And now – on this blustery, sundrenched Wednesday in Jamaica, beer in his hand, sharks on his mind, his freshly braided hair swinging in the wind – he assumes his position as the king of the sea. These days, Kid Rock is used to being the king of it all: the king of old-school partying and take-no-prisoners boasting the king who has cut through the false modesties, nervous ironies and uncertain melodies of our times with his own clever, crude, anthemic upsurges the king who predicted his each and every triumph while recording Devil Without a Cause, the album that then went on to crown him. Kid Rock – shirt off, sunglasses on – takes the chair from where the biggest deep-sea catches are reeled in, a central raised throne bolted to the back of the deck, and watches the coast of Jamaica recede. Sixty-five dollars a head is handed over by Kid Rock and his Detroit buddies (including his DJ and best friend, Kracker the rest of his band stays on land), two cases of Red Stripe are loaded (“When the beer’s gone,” Kid Rock swaggers, “the trip’s over”), and the boat slips past the cruise ships in Ocho Rios harbor, straight out to sea.

New Kids on the Rock by Mark Miller