Devil Without A Cause
Kid Rock
1998
Album Summary
Devil Without a Cause is the fourth studio album by American rapper Kid Rock. Released on August 18, 1998, the album saw Kid Rock continuing to develop his sound, moving away from the predominantly hip hop sound of his previous albums to a largely rap metal, hard rock, nu metal, and rap rock sound, and marked the finalization of his stage persona as a 'redneck pimp'. Additionally, the song "Cowboy" is seen as being instrumental in the development of the fusion genre country rap. Devil Without a Cause was a major commercial success. Spurred by the popularity of the single "Bawitdaba", the album sold 15 million copies, and was certified diamond. The album also received critical acclaim for its genre-mixing sound.
WikipediaWhere's the zero vote option? Would generally prefer to be deaf than listen to another Kid Rock song
A strong contender for being the worst album ever made. Presumably only exists to help the US armed forces torture people.
Honestly, this is so bad. It feels like your dad's highschool band reunion.
This isn't going to go well. Given his more recent political leanings, some of the lyrics are pretty progressive. Although, it's not surprising that most of this record is very bad. This sounds like something white dads think is hard or heavy. To be honest, the first two songs hit me like a nostalgia truck. "New Rock Radio" standards that played all through my youth. But even those were not good, just drilled into my subconscious. The rest of the album doesn't even have that, it a'int good.
My heart sank when I saw I had to spend 71 minutes of my life listening to Kid Rock. I'll try to listen with an open mind though, it could be good. UPDATE: Nope. It's dogsh*t. 1/5.
I can understand why this is included as a historical document- its a critical record for bringing the aesthetics of country into the world of the rap rock hybrid that had emerged just before it. I don't know that it holds up as a listening experience for me. I also struggle with him going the way of his fellow Michigander Ted Nugent into the black hole of ignorance that is the republican party.
Fuck everything about this album. Misogynistic and gross. I don't care if this help start the rap rock genre, it should be kicked off the list for being hot garbage.
Haters gonna hate. Sure, he's a fake and a piece of shit, but this is a great record.
Absolute wank. Unless this is all a masterful troll, in which case it could be genius. Cliched, pathetic lyrics that sounds like they were written by a 12 year old edgelord. Weak songs, with the horrible autotuned country song being a particularly notable low point. Only saving grace is that some of the production and musicianship is actually pretty good. I have no doubt that Kid Rock is talented, it's just disappointing that he didn't choose to funnel that talent into something with a bit more artistic merit. The fusion of rock, country and rap is something the world could have done without.
Most of his tracks sounds like shitty Rage Against the Machine spoofs.
Not really a fan of kid rock, sorta trash tbh, like bad beastie boys and I don't really like the beastie boys. If he coulda picked a genre
Absolute garbage. If you want to listen to edgy, filler lyrics with swearing put over a trash beat then this album is for you. Unfortunately for people with taste, this album is like eating an used sock dipped in mud.
My partner is from the Detroit metro area and grew up not too far from where Kid Rock is from. Despite what he says in his music, he grew up well off. This album is full of empty posturing; he wants so badly to be able to claim a backstory like Eminem's but it's just not the case. Stylistically, kid rock isn’t doing anything new, but he’s definitely doing it worse. His flow is decent, but is often undercut by awful rhymes and cheesy metal interludes. He’s trying to be too much at once, a rags to riches rapper who actually grew up relatively affluent and a southernish redneck from the north who needs auto tune to get through a straight country song. His use of profanity is gratuitous beyond what is necessary and one wonders if his sexual prowess is a fraction of how he portrays it. This music is clearly designed to appeal to disaffected white people but comes off as disingenuous and unnecessarily confrontational. This is music that absolutely no one needed. At best, it's someone trying, and not succeeding at genre fusion, at the worst, it's a cynical ploy to sell records to white people who think they're hard.
Kid Rock's fourth album. Interesting mix of styles. According to Detroit Free Press, Kid Rock had fully developed his pimp redneck stage persona and rap metal musical style and wanted to make a "redneck, shit-kicking rock 'n' roll rap" album. :)
Love Bawitdaba, that used to be a big pump up song for sports. That's it. Not sure I've ever liked anything else by Kid Rock. Granted I've never listened to this album. So ok, the first 6 songs are solid (most notably Cowboy and I am the Bullgod) but the whole thing is repetitive. Similar beats and lyrics. For example, I liked Roving Gangster but it also referenced topless dancers (Bawitdaba) and had a similar progression and sound as Cowboy. Second half of the album is barely tolerable. If it's decent it's because it sounds like the first half (Somebody's Gotta Feel This). Welcome 2 the Party is just terrible - as if he was trying to write worse lyrics than Vanilla Ice. I've always hated Only God Knows Why - pretentious, and auto tuned to hell. All in all, the album is not awful but it's also not good. Can't believe it sold over 10 million copies.
Wrestling with adolescent anguish and a tiny penis Kid Rock delivers a cry for help on this increasingly important record. This behemoth is truly one for the ages. Everything you ever thought you knew about music is forgotten here. There's both a prickly centre and shiny smooth edges polished to within spitting distance of a country nu metal lovechild that explores deep themes and tickles a dark underbelly of misery and misogyny. Eat a spoonful of this and stick it up your cunt, Jesus.
It annoys me that people aren't giving this an actual review. I guess it's because most are American redditors, so 90% of the reviews are some variation on "I have decided that kid rock is a *racist*. 1/5". Some were smart enough to add something about hating rap rock to legitimise their non-legitimate reviews, but eh. Fucking lame. Anyway, I was in year 10 when this album came out and it wasn't the megahit that stuff like limp bizkit was, but it had a grittier edge and some of it is really fucking catchy. I listened to it a fair bit and bawditibaba has been in my party playlists ever since. It's a real slice of that late 90s middle America swagger. I don't think anyone thought this sort of stuff was any kind of cultural touchstone - it just kinda existed as the mainstream form of heavy music for a fun couple of years. It's over now but it's fun to revisit every now and then. Realistically this album is a 3/5 by no means essential. But I'm compelled to give it a 5 out of spite.
Yeah Kid Rock is easy to hate on, and there's a lot of really stupid stuff on this album. But the 13 year old in me can still enjoy this after 23 years, so it must have something going for it.
You know, I don’t really mind the sound – it’s the kind of harder sound that I actually like. But the lyrics put me off. There’s a bit too much swearing for me; I appreciate a well-placed swear for emphasis, but this is gratuitous. There’s also some misogyny in there that bothers me.
Didn’t mind it and was all set for giving it 3 stars until the last track, which is absolutely vile and puts a different light on the rest of the album
Crap Metal, Country Crap, Crap Rock. He mixed a variety of genres and the album still manages to sound boring. 1 ⭐ for Eminem.
Riding on the coattails of the other successful rap/rock/metal combinations coming out in the late 90s, this album is an unoriginal boring mess of songs. The title tracks "Bawitdaba" that propelled him into the bigtime is like "MMMBop" for rebellious teens. Don't even get me started on the cheese of "Only God Knows Why", a track that has some abysmal auto-tune. I know there's some bad music from the 80s that I grew up with and have a soft side for and maybe if I were a decade or more younger this might have hit me in high school and I might be a little more generous with my review but to me there's nothing here that hasn't been done already by Korn or Rage Against the Machine except for perhaps "Cowboy" which has kind of a country rap thing going.
The rock and rap components individually are not bad. But the transitions are too jarring; I would be enjoying the guitar riff, and then suddenly the verse starts.
Wow. I feel like I've just licked a toad and fallen into another dimension. It's a fascinating clusterfuck. A total shitstorm of juvenile lyrics and lazy riffs. It reeks of somebody who's heard about a bunch of things that were cool in high-school, but never actually did them and now, approaching 30, is sat around with a blunt, telling 15 year olds how to be a rockstar just like him. A try-hard fuckwit. Banged Pamela Anderson though, eh?
I never turned off Kid when his songs came on the radio but I also never bought or listened to any of his albums all the way through. I still wouldn't buy this album or put it into my regular rotation, but some of the songs on this album still make me turn the volume all the way and bang my head to the beat!
The most well known songs I had heard before of in this album. Surprisingly really enjoyed this. A good mix of numetal, rap, hiphop and other genres.
Haters gunna hate I guess, but ya’ll need to lighten up a bit. Sure, he’s nowhere near as good at rapping as Eminem, nowhere near as good at rocking out as Rage Against the Machine and nowhere near as good at…. line dancing as Billy Ray Cyrus? (I know nothing about country), but he is mashing up genres like he doesn’t give a fuck and I found the results are enjoyable. He didn’t really make it over to the UK at the time so I’m judging just on the tracks presented here. I reckon a lot of the 1 stars are from Americans who are judging this on the “full package”. I’m sure his personality is completely vile, but thankfully I’ve not really been exposed to that so can go purely off the music, which I think is good fun. How can you not love that Second Hand News sample?
Nowhere near as bad as made out - enjoyed some parts of it and had me laughing at its stupidity at many points but after the run on this group that was no bad thing
An album that would most accurately be described as a guilty pleasure. A lot of the songs are pretty bad to unbareable,, However, there are some songs that go hard and I will definitely come back to. Highlights: 1, 3, 4, and 6.
Never listened to kid rock before, have to say i quite enjoyed this though. Loads of memories and themes in the music, for example i can hear a lot of becks sound in it and i thought beck was a one off, but clearly there was a bigger scene. Bawitadaba or whatever its called puts me in mind of RATM. I have to say that i thought that kid rock and this whole nu metal thing was just a sideshow but this listen had revealed that its actually a lot more than that. Cowboy could be a very good song also as could fist of rage which takes me back to RATM. Glad i listened to this tbf, want to give it 2.5 but thats not an option so its getting 3
I was surprised that those first two tracks were the big hits. I thought they'd be scattered throughout the album. "Bawitdaba" gets stuck in your head pretty quick. It's been said that the key to the album is that is doesn't try to be a hip-hop album. And yet a lot of the lyrics feel that way, like what would guys who are out in the midwest THINK rappers would go on about? And then instead of it being on rap, it was forced into a blend of country and "nu metal". It works, but the lyrics to some of the songs are pretty brutal. More brutal than some rap records we have listened to? Probably not. Maybe if I had heard them over and over again I wouldn't think about it as much. But now, 20 years later, the lyrics are a bit more cringe-y. So yeah, I remember the big "hits" from this one, but not something I would come back to for a bunch of reasons. But the construction and production is done well. So I'd give it a 3.
Cowboy is still a banger but this is way too long and I just can't support a Trumper.
Despite all the hate Kid Rock and this album get, his debut is by far his strongest effort, as well as being the 10th best selling rock album of the 90s. If this was an EP of just the first 4 tracks and maybe a couple others, I would award him a 3 or maybe even a 4. I'm not here to criticize the trashy culture and lies he proclaims (like bragging about growing up in Detroit). Purely looking at the music, the production is funky and tight. The first 4 tracks are pretty good (ignore that cringy child voice), but the rest mostly sucks with just a few decent parts. The riffs are uninspired: it's an embarrassment of a rock album. The raps lack substance and are repetitive, but at least he has energy and has nice rhythm here and there. He tries to sound like Zack de la Rocha, but he's too repetitive to be anything beyond that. I like the old school hip hop half of "Wecome 2 the Party," but fuck the bro who requests "that fuckin 1998 Kid Rock shit." His country songs are the worst. I can't believe "Only God Knows Why" was a big hit... the autotune and dull melody hurt my ears. "Where U at Rock" is the only good song in the second half. "Black Guy White Guy" is a bit decent but it's three times longer than it needs to, and did we really need a copy & paste of "I am the Bullgod"? It's the best song on the album but I didn't notice much different. He loses points for lack of originality, a repeated formula in most of the songs, and for being way too long. Cut the album in half. On the plus side, it is focused and has nice production. This is actually on the borderline of 1 star / 2 star review, but those first 4 songs are enough to redeem itself.
It's not hard to see why Kid Rock was such a cultural force during the late 90s/early 2000s. There's a ton of charisma on this record, mixed with Kid Rock's "redneck pimp" character. There's a large swath of genres blended here, though country and country rock blends with metal and rap more often than not. Kid Rock is fine enough on the mic, though he is absolutely blown out of the water by the best white MC to ever grace the game on "Fuck Off". It's more a time capsule than anything: where I appreciate that it's here in order to tell the story of nu-metal in the late 90s, I think there are better examples of the genre. Also, how the fuck does Holland-Dozier-Holland have a writing credit on this record? Did they come up with the "blow bubbles up your asshole" line, or the "your girl is sucking my cock while I'm taping it" one? Favorite tracks: "Cowboy", "Bawitdaba", "Wastin' Time"
I have never listened to anything that has made me so completely sure that the person responsible for it is a total c**t. It's like the Beastie Boys, mixed with the worst of early 90's rap/hiphop, with any charm or nuance stripped out. Lyrics are a mixture of generic self-promotion that regularly turns into breathtakingly unself-aware arrogance, and lazy misogyny. But, there are bits of it that are quite catchy Nearly burst out laughing with Only God Knows Why (a self-pitying song lamenting how people don't understand him and like him) after ten songs of this, and then immediately followed by a song titled 'Fuck Off' Pretty much every song is at least a minute too long (and there is a line in one of the songs where h talks about the producers telling him this and him ignoring them). 2/5, because it was quite entertaining in places.
Probably the greatest album that i have had the privildge to indulge myself upon and bath in the kid rock glorry
This is only here to let you know that Fred Durst was not the worst thing about music at the turn of the millennium. Honestly not deserving of its one star. Makes Sade, Yes and the Eagles sound like the Beatles. And as a human being, he sounds like the reason God created cancer and dysentry.
Felt dirty just cueing this up. Then the first song was better than expected. Then the rest wasn't. 15M people bought this
I’ll admit I went into this totally biased, but it’s not AS bad as I assumed it would be, as someone who had never heard Kid Rock’s music before. Definitely not 1001 albums of all time material, though……… I feel like people often romanticise the 90s but this album made me glad to have not been born yet. Best track: I kinda liked the funky auto tune on Only God Knows Why Worst tracks: Welcome 2 the Party, Fuck Off, Where U At Rock, Bawitdaba, Cowboy, Devil Without A Cause, Roving Gangster, I Got One for Ya’, Somebody’s Gotta Feel This, Black Chick, White Guy/I Am the Bulldog (WHY is this song TWELVE MINUTES LONG????? I thought it was almost OVER). 1 star for…. creativity I guess 👍🏼
I heard all of the singles off of this when it came out in 1998 on MTV or the radio, and I'll ask now what I asked then: If you are outside of the demographic where rap-rock/nü-metal was popular (not in the age range to be an aggro-douche at Woodstock 99), what is there to like about this? An artistic persona that's just as contrived as Vanilla Ice without any of the backlash, "old school" rap stylings on Welcome 2 the Party that owe less to Run-DMC's King of Rock than to some middle-aged white doofus dropping "My name is Steve and I'm here to say...". This is as credible as an unfunny rapping grandma sketch that you'd find from a bad improv group in Des Moines. The language or misogyny on this aren't the main offenders for me - instead this album just feels contrived and cynical and lazy. To those who claim that this album is good or important because it blends metal and hip hop and country, who cares? I can mash rockabilly, Tuvan throat singing, and Portuguese fado together, and that doesn't result in anything good simply because nobody's blended those genres together. And the lasting influence of this album is pretty much limited to bro-country artists who learned that cynically adopting a faux-redneck persona and singing about eating riblets at Applebee's and drinking cheap beer in a field (you know, "simple pleasures" that these musicians wouldn't be caught anywhere near) will move a few units. On the plus side, the guitars on the track Devil Without a Cause are pretty cool.
True childhood classic - saw Rock perform most of this record live back in 02.
Surprisingly great choruses for a rock album. Thoroughly enjoyed something that I would otherwise not listened to.
OK. At last something genuinely interesting. Rap with guitars! I really liked this.
A bit of a groove. I want to dislike it but it's actually pretty good.
The redneck rap rock album that I am kinda ashamed to say I get down with some of it. Damn it kid just pick up the phone and never autotune a ballad again. Stick to rapping over guitar about getting laid and doing drugs, definitely not the peak of music. But pretty fun for some of it.
I thought this was quintessentially Kid Rock at his peak. Not a huge fan of his stuff, but I do like how he really wants to be country. 🤠
Wasnt bad when it came out and is still good. Not great but not bad either.
I really dug this album when it came out. Now granted, I think Kid Rock is a douchebag now, I can't deny listening to this album quite a bit back in high school.
This album has a bias opinion from me. I first listened as a preteen and loved it. Which is probably the right age to make that statement. Re-listening as an adult I have to say I feel the same. Specifically for ‘bawitdaba’. You don’t go to kid rock for introspective lyrics and compelling compositions, you go to kid rock for crude, unhinged ass kicking ignorance so you can feel that bliss baby. ‘Cowboy’ is an awesome song I don’t care who you are.
All of the people giving this a "1" rating I don't think understand the historical significance (for better or worse) of this album. This is regarded as one of the (if not THE) first country-rap albums ever, with "Cowboy" generally regarded as the actual birth of the genre. Is it the best album ever? Certainly not, but this ushered in several other similar acts over the years and even influencing modern country; for that reason deserves to be included on this list and respected. For all his faults, Kid Rock basically invented a new genre with this album, which deserves a lot of credit.
Well, not sure that it actually deserves 4* but it was really good to have a more dynamic listen than we' ve had for a while !
Why is there a child singing in Devil Without a Cause? Eminem feature goes crazy. I’ve heard Kid Rock labeled as one of the most talented musicians of all time and this album was a testament to the statement. The switching between genres during the album and during the songs was phenomenal and well mixed. I am confused however as my parents have been to multiple Kid Rock concerts during my life but I cannot picture them enjoying to any of the songs on this album
Tbh i did not expect much at all from this album. But I was pleasantly surprised. It's not really my style but i do understand why it's on the list
Okay his flow sucks and he has approximately 2 things to say over this hour long album but I have to say this has ~atmosphere~ and the production is really good
3/5 this album confused me. It seemed to have from hiphop toy classic rock to metal...
Seeing kid rock in this lists makes me laugh but this album isn’t bad. Has some good hits. Some of the rapping is meh but the style changes makes it good for a wide range of people. 7.5/10
Not a bad album. In fact I was surprised how much I liked it. I will listen again. Pretty close to a 4 but ots a little too long so I'll give it a 3 🌟
This is actually pretty competent, though the rap-rock delivery is not that original. The whole redneck pimp schtick I really just have no interest in (don't much give a shot about any other kind of pimp actually).