Kid Rock famously made headlines in 2018 calling The View host Joy Behar a bitch during a Fox News interview from his honky-tonk bar in downtown Nashville, and then he doubled down in video captured by TMZ the following year in a drunken rant in which he called out Behar again, along with Oprah Winfrey and Kathie Lee Gifford, but at least one of those TV hosts shouted out was not an intended target of Rock’s.
Within the 2019 rant, Rock told an audience at his Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock ‘n’ Roll Steakhouse, “I’m not a bad guy, I’m just an honest guy that says, ‘Hey, I don’t like Oprah Winfrey or Joy Behar.”
“Sorry, mom,” he added, after blasting the TV hosts by shouting obscenities. “They’re like, ‘Hey, you’re fucking racist.’ And I’m like, ‘You’re fucking weird.’ You call your people, I’ll call mine.” As he continued on with his tirade, swaying around the stage and also throwing TV host Kathie Lee Gifford’s name into the mix of slurs, members of the audience could be heard yelling back at the star, calling him racist.
During a chat with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson for his Tucker Carlson Originals, Rock revealed that the shouting down of Kathie Lee Gifford during that rant was a case of mistakenly calling out the wrong person in the heat of the moment, with comedienne Kathy Griffin being his intended target after she famously posed in a photo holding up a severed Trump head.
“I was trying to go after Kathy Griffin you know, for holding up Trump’s head, but I’m so out of it I’m like ‘fuck Kathie Lee Gifford,’” he said. “When it comes back on TMZ or whatever a few weeks later I’m like, ‘Oh man, I like Kathie Lee Gifford.’ We’ve been kind of friendly throughout the years.”
That said, he tells Carlson that he has no plans to apologize for his drunken rant in which he called out Oprah and Behar, adding, “A drunk man’s words are a sober man’s thoughts, I own what I said. I don’t apologize to anybody. I’m not an Oprah Winfrey fan. I got drunk and fuckin’ next thing, I’m onstage [saying] fuck Oprah…”
After Rock’s initial beef with Behar in 2018, he was removed as the Grand Marshal of Nashville’s Christmas Parade. The following year, Rock’s Made In Detroit restaurant in Little Caesars Arena was shuttered in Detroit after the musician chose not to renew his license. The move came just as the National Action Network was set to hold a press conference outside Rock’s restaurant denouncing the musician for his comments on Winfrey.
After video of his rant against Oprah went public, the musician tweeted that it had to do with her booking policy, stating, “My people tried to get me to do The Oprah Winfrey Show years ago and her people wanted me to write down 5 reasons why I loved her and her show… I said fuck that and her. End of story.” But the explanation didn’t stop the backlash.
Earlier this year, while speaking with Carlson, the singer was asked why he hasn’t been cancelled. The musician responded, “I am uncancellable … [cause] I don’t give a fuck.” He went on to add, “I’m not in bed with any big corporate things. At the end of the day, there’s nobody I’m beholden to – no record companies, no corporate interests, no nothing. You can’t cancel me. I love it when they try.”
Rock is back on the road this year, sharing stages with Foreigner, Grand Funk Railroad and Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening. See his scheduled dates here.
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