To no surprise, you knew Kid Rock’s latest album First Kiss was going to be an all out turd Howitzer on your ear drums and sanity…and sometimes in this line of work you take a bullet or two…and let’s just say, this time, I was mortally wounded.
Imagine if Sarah Palin and Toby Keith wrote the lyrics to 10 beer and Chevy truck commercial jingles, all the while snagging the back-up band from an amateur night at the local Hooters; a band called something like “Rhythm & Booze,” “Cruisin’ for a Bluezin,’” or “If I Told Ya I’d Have Tequilla,” with Ted Nugent sitting at the mixing board sucking the marrow out of a weasel bone and periodically saying “Damn right”.
First Kiss weaves together every possible mid-western, southern bumpkin, “Real American” stereotype you can think of to the point of complete absurdity (you almost wonder if Kid Rock is laughing at and not with). Throughout this First Kiss, you’re constantly waiting for the Country Bear Jamboree to kick in and make those doingy-doing-doing mouth harp sounds over “Cat Scratch Fever,” all the while doing donuts in a Walmart parking lot, truck-balls uh danglin’, high on synthetic weed, firing a rifle off at the smiley faces on the cart corrals….BUT…in the end, it’s all for the man upstairs… there are Jesus references a plenty in First Kiss and when Kid Rock isn’t mad about “schools without God” and “takin’ his guns away” , he clogs up the rest of this toilet with every other lyric being about alcohol- whiskey, wine, champagne, moonshine, etc., because we all know that JC condones alcoholism and is up there right now doing Jim Beam body shots off strippers in cowboy boots and makin’ it rain missiles on those godless sand people.
Once I reached the grand finale of First Kiss and “bonus” track, “FOAD” (stands for Fuck Off And Die), I was questioning my own existence and asking “why?” and “how?”. The only plausible theory was maybe this record was accidentally leaked from our government and is actually a carefully constructed concept album that was only to be used in Guantanamo Bay, because after a couple rounds of First Kiss, getting water boarded would feel like a champion blow job.
The music ranges from sounding like a Don Henley or Bryan Adams song you heard as a kid that your brain has been trying to erase over the years, but some of that remaining shrapnel spark the associations; and the rest of it is every white-guy-blues-country riff cliché you can think of; thus making First Kiss the soundtrack to wrestling lawn furniture while your cousin-wife watches on and accidentally spits out a tooth while putting in a new chew as your 3.5 kids are digging holes in your front yard and shoving firecrackers into a cat’s ass.
Editors Note: Here’s our writer Ricky Vigil’s Kid Rock fan page that he made when he was a kid. This rules so much!
Rating: 0 out of 6 Doves After hearing Kid Rock’s First Kiss, Prince told his managers to track down as many copies of this album that they could find so he could run them over with his Soul Scooter for a public shaming. The fact that he had to waste time doing this made him even more angry and he proceeded to file lawsuits against the band for having to endure the “Purple Pain” caused by how fucking awful this First Kiss was.