Though ICE has gone after some musicians, in most cases the ones owning bar and grills via their staff — Vanilla Ice to the best of my knowledge has gone unscathed, as he is just too … vanilla.
If you heat it up a bit, as in spicier toppings on your entrees, you just might get a trip South of the Border. Free transit — does that bus in these days of climate change have AC, standing for American Crossing? — to go to international-prison incarceration, on the dime of the taxpayer. But will the cost to them, as someone has to pay for all these raids, be more than just upping your tip amount?
Rockers have been in the news for more than just miss-striking a chord on guitar, which is rare even in live shows. They have struck a chord with their political views, and the fallout that comes from anything close to free speech. In at least in one prominent case, their restaurants have been virtually shut down.
Three of the Nashville steakhouse and bar venues owner by Kid Rock had the “closed” sign put up on their door the weekend before Memorial Day weekend — don’t get it wrong and call it Labor Day or heaven help writer and country make a typo and term ICE as ISIS — as workers either called in sick or were sent home really early because of rumored ICE raids later that day. This was more feared than getting a pink slip because you made the steak too pink/rare.
It turns out that ardent Trump supporter Kid Rock, in an ultimate show of hypocrisy, had undocumented workers slaving over the hot stoves needed to make steak for his customers. The same type Trump wants to send packing.
Is this not the ultimate irony and case of bite the hand that feeds you?
So Kid Rock, who once famously sang-rapped, “I can smell a pig a mile away,” is in the hot seat. The guy does have talent, and helped make it cool to be white trailer trash — there are ironies everywhere here — with his debut album. But he has put on the patriotic pants, both literally and figuratively and putted on the golf course with Trump — can someone who thinks with like mind about immigrants safely take a mulligan? — and performed for him too, at an event or two, as the trailer home meets White House.
So where is a song from such a man coming? Never to be shy with words, I’ll take a stab. The first thing that always stabbed at me when my bartender friend Danyiel played Cowboy (jukebox version) to death when it first came out is this line: “Cuss like a sailor, drink like a mick. My only words of wisdom are ‘radio edit’ … and so on.” (You can guess what the full three words are.) At first not a fan of this line or two, but as I like Kid Rock grow older decades later, I appreciate this is an original bit of genius. Normally a radio bleep is just a single bad word, and the censors must be sleeping on the job because they often miss one, this goes back as far as The Who, but this is three words, constituting in its constitution an entire phrase. One more f— you to the establishment, even if that’s just those insane record labels, as Kid Rock does have a message and it resonates. (Like any too dumb to turn down back in turn-table days extending an offer to Insane Clown Posse, damn, and just ask Dr. Phil.) But I would make it better, by saying “think” like a mick, as it gives secondary rhyme and we’ve already established the drinking part after pulling time-and-a-half, and not being careful where you throw the cans. And Kid Rock understands the mindset of a construction roofer or carpenter, and plays to them just as well as Trump.
You’ll have to wait just a bit for the rest of the full story on what makes Kid Rock tick and the message he’s trying to get across, and two other singers who have recently gotten caught up in the web of ICE, and this could be seen as the mutual plight of extreme rural meets inner-city urban, and the blue-collar blues. This will be added soon to this piece, including the draw to Trump, and is the next in line.
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