Kid Rock, who has never been one to hide his viewpoints, many of which align with former President Donald Trump and his conservative GOP base, has announced that he won’t be playing any venues that require masks, vaccines, and other COVID-19-related mandates and restrictions.
The Michigan-based rocker made his announcement ahead of his upcoming Bad Reputation Tour, according to the Daily Mail, which added:
In a four-plus minute video, the American Badass star, 51, told fans they would be refunded for tickets if the venues still had such COVID-19 mandates by the date of any of his scheduled concerts.
“There’s been a lot of talk about vaccine mandates and venues. People saying, ‘I’m not going to that venue because of the vaccine mandate,’ and this, that, and the other,” Kid Rock noted in a vid that appears to have been taken in his home studio.
Warning: Strong language:
View this post on Instagram
“Trust me, we’ve done all our research on this and the consensus says that all this is going to be done, if there are any at these venues, I’m not aware of any, but if there are any, they’re going to be gone by the time we get to your city. If they’re not, trust me, you don’t have to worry. You’ll be getting your money back because I won’t be showing up either,” he added.
Born Robert James Ritcher, Kid Rock went on to address people he calls “haters” as well as the “liberal media.”
“If you think I’m going to be sit out there and sing ‘Don’t Tell Me How To Live’ and ‘We The People’ while people are holding up their f***ing vaccine cards and wearing masks. That s**t ain’t happening,” he said, adding that his event planners have already taken Buffalo, N.Y., and Toronto, Canada, off the venue list of cities.
“I don’t want to deal with that s**t either, and I know that you don’t,” Rock said.
“And by the way, there you go liberal media: there’s your clickbait for tomorrow; to f**k with me, ‘Kid Rock said this about mandates and he’s not showing up.’ F**k y’all,” he added.
He went on to say that he has spent the majority of his time during the COVID pandemic in his studio tooling on a new album, which is also titled, “Bad Reputation.”
“I’m glad you’re digging them [the new songs],” he said, adding that those tunes “got all the haters’ pantie in a bunch too.”
“Let’s see what they try to cancel me for now. I’m unf***ing cancellable. Suck on that,” he said.
Rock also noted that he’s never had much interest in, or given too much credence to, music industry awards or song positions on charts during his career. But he did admit that he has “played the game a little bit through the years, but that is over.”
“I’m not beholden to anyone anymore,” he said, adding that he and his team will be releasing three new songs in three different musical genres to see if they will climb the iTunes chart.
“We also have ‘The Last Dance’ that was No. 1 on the rock chart and then ‘Rockin” got to number three. So that another big f**k you to the critics; I kind of like that,” he said.
Daily Mail added more details about Rock’s upcoming tour and dates:
The trek through parts of the U.S. kicks off on April 6 in Evansville, Indiana. There are shows scattered through until September 17 in Clarkston, Michigan.
There are still plenty of open dates, so fans might want to keep checking to see if Rock adds more dates to the tour.
