Opinion | Kid Rock rages at snowflakes in new song, unaware he’s the biggest snowflake of all

Kid Rock is like a high school friend you bump into 25 years later who still has the same haircut and vibe of a rebellious teen.

You: “Hey, man, great to see you! What are you up to these days?”

Kid Rock: “I’m still sticking it to The Man, man.”

You smile politely and say you gotta dash because you have an appointment with your financial advisor. Kid Rock sneers, cracks open a Badass American Lager and gives the middle finger to the clouds.

In his new video, “Don’t Tell Me How To Live,” he is again going nuclear on anyone who might have the audacity to tell him, you know, how to live. This includes — and I quote — “hoes,” “fake news,” “millennials offended,” “p-ssies” and “snowflakes.”

I watched the video on Tuesday and felt like I just awoke after falling into a coma in 1998. Is this a deep cut from 1998’s “Devil Without A Cause”?

If Hooked on Phonics dabbled in the profane, this would be it: “And 20 years later, bitch, I still f—ing mean it/ Bucka bucka, you ain’t never met a motherf—еr like this/ Kiss my ass, then you can suck a …”

Charming. Kid Rock, who might consider changing his stage name to Grandpa Rock now that he’s a quinquagenarian prone to quadraphonic quackery, has spent the last quarter-century in a state of performative rage and arrested development. It’s strange and sad.

The new video has all the production values of a late-night used-car dealership ad on local TV. If someone told me this was a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, I wouldn’t blink. On Monday, even the grandmaster of musical spoofs, Weird Al Yankovic, felt inclined to tweet a tongue-in-cheek clarification: “To everybody that’s congratulating me right now on my new Kid Rock parody video, let me clarify — that’s not me. That’s actually Kid Rock.”

Ouch. I guarantee you, that left a bruise.

Featuring Canadian band Monster Truck — those ZZ Top wannabes will regret this collab — Grandpa Rock’s new song boils down to three key lines: “So what the f—’s up with all the backlash?/ You snowflakes, here’s a news flash!/ Ain’t nobody gonna tell me how to live!”

A little later, Grandpa Rock joins the “space race” and goes to Mars, clinging to the outside of a rocket ship that looks like a clay statue of a middle finger as he clutches a handgun and bottle of Jim Beam. When he touches down on Mars, with no breathing apparatus to deal with the 95 per cent carbon dioxide, he sparks up a joint. I was reminded of an observation from Leo Tolstoy: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Since he’s been embroiled in so many celebrity controversies — trash-talking Oprah, getting into a punch-up with Tommy Lee, dissing Taylor Swift’s politics, spouting a Christmas message on “Fox & Friends” to love everybody, “except that Joy Behar bitch” — it’s hard to pinpoint the “backlash” Grandpa Rock is backlashing against in his new video.

But my guess is it’s the backlash he received this summer, after using a homophobic slur onstage because the crowd at the Fishlipz Bar & Grill in Tennessee was filming him with their iPhones. When this became a flashpoint, Grandpa Rock doubled down with a tweet in the third person that argued anyone offended by the original F-word slur might, in fact, be the F-word slur: “If Kid Rock using the word f—-t offends you, good chance you are one …”

Right. This new song is a cautionary tale for the limits of defiance, and the value of personal evolution. Expand your horizons. Keep growing. Keep learning. Don’t get imprisoned by dogma and partisan hostility.

There was something interesting about Kid Rock when he entered the culture in the ’90s as a musical hybrid fusing a hillbilly sensibility with rap and metal flourishes. The anti-authoritarianism felt real. But when he now belts out “I’m the last of a few still screamin,’ ‘F— you’” all I can do is chortle into my middle-aged cardigan.

No, sir. This is false. You unwisely became a MAGA mascot, and the problem now is most of your fans are also now screamin’ eff you at everything and anything they don’t like. Wear a mask? Eff you! Democrats? Eff you! Reading and science? Eff you! Multiculturalism? Eff you! The MSM? Eff you! Kale and broccoli? Eff you!

Over the last five years, Grandpa Rock was in a unique position to influence a demo that has few role models in popular culture, mostly because Hollywood is overrun with liberal hypocrites who sneer at the kinds of people who might gravitate toward a Grandpa Rock.

Do I believe he is racist and homophobic? Absolutely not. I believe Grandpa Rock is a fundamentally good man, but too stupid and brittle and defensive to fulfil the long-term destiny of a good man.

He is trapped in his own past, and adolescent feelings of not quite fitting in. And so instead of encouraging his fans to see the big picture, he is still making the same music, with the same lame messages from the ’90s. And his voice still sounds like an angry magpie with sandpaper in the larynx. We really ought to start a GoFundMe for vocal lessons. And hire a psychologist to figure out how the antagonist became the victim.

Grandpa Rock is now railing against snowflakes, which is ironic.

He has become the biggest snowflake of all.