Album: Kid Rock

Cocky, Lava/Atlantic

The rap-rocker Kid Rock may not know much, but he knows what he likes, and he likes what he knows. His home town, Detroit, comes high on the listof his favourite things, along with booze, drugs, money, himself, hip hop, boogie music, not giving a damn and breasts, the latter a matter on which he has very firm opinions. "Skinny models? You can keep those!" he barks on the title track. "I like big, corn-fed Midwestern hos!" And such is his success that the Kid has reached the apex of his desires by becoming the main squeeze of Pamela Anderson, "the baddest bitch in the world", as the silver-tongued devil notes. For all his success, Cocky finds Kid Rock unchanged from his 1998 debut, Devil without a Cause, plying the same mix of voguish rap rebellion and redneck boogie – one track even features a guitar quote from "Freebird", illustrating the life-changing moment in Kid's musical education – with little variation. So little variation, in fact, that the first two tracks here, "Trucker Anthem" and "Forever", seem to be identical, with much the same feisty breakbeat riff, truculent delivery, and message (I'm back! I'm great!). So all-consuming is Kid's self-interest that, at the conclusion of one track, the engineer halts his flow with an exasperated: "Dude! Stop! There's more to life than just you!" It's one of a couple of smart-ass rejoinders that go a long way to ameliorating the customary rap-rock abrasiveness, suggesting that Kid Rock takes himself a little less seriously than, say, Fred Durst.