Kid Rock

By combining skanky butt rock with pimp-diddy rap forms, Detroit native Kid Rock demonstrates a Johnny Depp-like acumen for appropriating a downmarket Caucasian Camaro-jockey aesthetic to hue his canny show-bidness approach. He’s no Axolotl Rosenkreuz; Rock may mimic a white trash persona, but he’s a few dime bags short of a serious crankster pistol-whipping meltdown, and the lads he’s nicking for inspiration, given the shot, most likely would steal the Kid’s lunch money to buy more drugs. So Rock’s bumped uglies with Sheryl Crow and Pamela Anderson? He duets with Crow on “Picture,” a cardinal treatise on the perils of why “street cred”-worshiping dopes should avoid boffing celebrities. And on “You’ve Never Met a Motherf**cker Quite Like Me,” Rock cops Skynyrd’s “Freebird” riff, then namechecks Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, who supposedly hipped him to jazz. Cocky? Nope. Limp.