When Kid Rock was ‘Black’

Terence Jones did not know what to make of the skinny, cocky white boy.

It was the summer of 1987, and the man known around the way as T-Bone was attending a party in Clemons, Michigan, at the VFW Hall thrown by East Detroit hip-hop collective the Beast Crew. Jones was a member of the rising rap clique led by respected artist and turntablist James “The Blackman” Harris, who formed the group in the mid-80s as a way to keep kids in the neighborhood off the streets.

“That evening, we had a DJ contest,” a gregarious Jones recalled nearly four decades later from his home in Glendale, Arizona. “And this guy named Bo Wisdom introduces us to a 16-year-old who called himself Kid Rock and asked Black if he could get on the turntables. And Black was like, ‘Yeah, let the white boy get on.’

“So he gets on the turntables, and man, the whole party stopped. He started cutting and scratching records like crazy. People were like, ‘This kid is good!’” 

Harris was intrigued by the young Kid Rock, born Robert “Bob” Ritchie. While he was nowhere near the lyrical apex of Eminem, Detroit’s future “Great White Hope,” Kid Rock possessed immense swagger and showmanship.

Harris gave the hardcore Run-DMC fan from the affluent suburbs of Romeo, Michigan, a certified “hood pass,” and the Beast Crew welcomed Kid Rock into the fold.

Doing so was a risky and radical move.

The ’80s were a period of racial and economic transitioning for a segregated Motown. White flight, accelerated by the 1967 uprising in which 43 people were killed, more than 1,000 were injured and more than 7,000 were arrested, had transformed Mayor Coleman Young’s city into one with a 70% Black population.

The mere idea of Kid Rock, son of Bill Ritchie, a multimillionaire owner of a lucrative car dealership empire, moving from a five-acre, 5,628-square-foot estate to inner city East Detroit was absurd.

“The Blackman [Harris] was the one that really groomed Bobby,” said former Beast Crew member Brian “Champtown” Harmon, founder of Straight Jacket Records and director of the 2018 documentary The Untold Story of Detroit Hip Hop.

Harmon described Harris as “Detroit’s Kool Herc,” referring to the legendary Bronx DJ credited with igniting the birth of hip-hop in New York in 1973.

Indeed, Harris, a gifted, eclectic DJ and serious P-Funk fan, brought hope to aspiring hip-hop heads in Detroit.

Before the legendary likes of Detroit’s Most Wanted, DJ Los, Prince Vince, Awesome Dre, Esham, Smiley and Boss made noise for the Motor City, Harris had already been on tour with rap heavyweights Kurtis Blow, LL Cool J, Roxanne Shante, Marley Marl and MC Shan.

The Beastie Boys — Def Jam Records’ wild, beer-guzzling white provocateurs — were multiplatinum menaces. In Kid Rock, Harris saw the future: a white solo rap superstar. 

“I mentored that guy to what he is now. … Basically, I raised him,” Harris said in The Untold Story of Detroit Hip Hop, later adding, “I lent my talents to help Kid Rock grow as an artist. I did that from the bottom of my heart, man.”

A decade-plus and four albums later, in May 1999, Kid Rock would score his first platinum album, Devil Without a Cause, which moved 11 million copies with the help of his breakout hit single “Bawitdaba.” By 2001, the self-proclaimed rap-rock American badass reinvented himself as a country music outlaw.

Yet Kid Rock’s career trajectory has taken some disturbing turns, particularly since the turn of the century.

He began performing onstage with the Confederate flag as a backdrop during shows, though in 2010 he stopped displaying the flag altogether.

And while Kid Rock had made it a point to project himself as nonpartisan when it came to politics — he supported former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and performed for Barack Obama at his 2009 Youth Ball inauguration — his vociferous backing of Donald Trump and subsequent turn as MAGA America’s official celebrity attack dog has left many miffed.

Following a widely panned Feb. 8 performance as headliner of Turning Point USA’s tepid, seemingly lip-synced, “conservative” alternative to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, Kid Rock seemingly took a shot at hip-hop legend and mogul Shawn “JAŸ-Z” Carter.

“I respect his music and his hustle, but he seems kind of like a DEI hire,” Kid Rock said of JAŸ-Z, whose Roc Nation entertainment company has produced the halftime show since 2020. It was a loud dog whistle aimed at the right-wing ecosystem that has weaponized diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as a means to question the competency of Black people.

And then there’s Kid Rock’s drunken 2024 Rolling Stone interview in which he brandished a gun and spouted out the N-word several times.

It is known in Kid Rock’s circles that his father Bill, who died in 2024, was not particularly happy with his son’s early pursuit of a hip-hop career.

Even more alarming was that his son was chasing his dreams in Detroit with those people and the fact he had a child with a Black woman at the age of 22.

“That was a stressful time when my son was born,” Kid Rock told Rolling Stone in the same interview. “A white kid, not married, bringing home a half-Black kid to a Catholic well-to-do family. There were borderline things, like maybe using the N-word at times, but my son and my dad became best friends. People say that people can’t change. Yes, they f‑‑‑ing can.”

Which is why Kid Rock’s recent “change” has been so perplexing for those who came up with him during his grind in Detroit, when it was the norm for the tight-knit Beast Crew to share a bag of $0.99 potato chips and a 2-liter bottle of Faygo pop in red plastic cups.

“He did not come from that, but he learned about that life when he got with us,” said Harmon, who went on to record a young Eminem on his Straight Jacket Records imprint in 1991 and last year released the rap-rock album Rocker At Heart, executive produced by Ice-T. “Some people call Kid Rock a culture vulture, but I’m going to keep it real and say it was an even exchange. He came to the city of Detroit and learned from the Blackest n‑‑‑‑s you could learn from.”

Harmon said Kid Rock returned the favor, opening a door to white Detroit.

“On the flip side, Bob took me to the suburbs at a young age, which helped me as a businessman early on, because a lot of people in Detroit back then never traveled beyond the ‘hood,” he said. “His mother [Susan Ritchie] was like a mother to me. His sisters were like sisters to me. I’ve toured the world, flown in private jets and have eaten $1,000 meals with Bobby. I haven’t talked to him in about 10 years, but if I bumped into him right now, whatever issues we have, we will go over in the corner and handle those issues and get back to being family again.”

Years before the excessive MAGA shilling — the latest example being a laughably cringe workout video with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the controversial secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — Kid Rock was just a white kid who loved hip-hop.

After opening up for KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, the group’s spin master Derrick “D-Nice” Jones — yes, the same D-Nice who would later become everyone’s go-to celebrity DJ — was so impressed with Kid Rock’s stage presentation that he helped him land a deal with Jive Records in 1988.

Bay Area rap king Too $hort produced tracks on Kid Rock’s 1990 debut Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast. The LP cover featured a cartoon Kid Rock rocking a high-top fade alongside mentor and hype man the Blackman (Harris), hanging out at a soul food joint.

Kid Rock and the Beast Crew went out on tour in support of Too $hort and Ice Cube. And while Kid Rock was subsequently dropped by Jive, a casualty of fellow white rapper Vanilla Ice’s chart-topping ascendence, he was turning heads.

“Bob was the hardest working motherf‑‑‑er,” Harmon said.

Jones, however, is far less complimentary when it comes to his former associate.

“He turned his back on Black folks,” he said. “I would always joke to Bob, ‘When you get older, you are going to be racist just like your daddy.’ And he would say, ‘No I’m not … that’s never gonna happen!’”

Jones was especially disappointed at Kid Rock over the aforementioned Confederate flag controversy, though Ritchie claimed he was just paying homage to the country rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd.

“I love America, I love Detroit, and I love Black people,” Kid Rock said in 2011 at the Cobo Center after being called out by African American community leaders upon receiving the Great Expectations Award from Detroit’s NAACP chapter.

“I’m asking Bob all the tough questions, like, what’s up with that Confederate s‑‑‑?” Jones said, alluding to the flag that was adopted as a symbol for white supremacy during the Civil Rights era.

“Where I live now in Arizona, they didn’t celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday. We were all protesting that. We got MLK T-shirts on and everything, and Bob had the T-shirt on too because we were all trying to make MLK a holiday in Arizona. How do you go from that to waving a Confederate flag?”

Kid Rock has long since moved on and embraced his unlikely next career jump.

In February, he landed his first No.1 single on the Billboard Hot Christian Songs chart with his cover of the 2021 Cody Johnson spiritual “Til You Can’t.”

This from a dude who clapped back at his detractors on his latest single that “Ain’t nothing changed here, I still don’t give a f—k!”

When it comes to being a chameleon, he might just be right.

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