It’s like our grandpa always told us (often unprompted, and at increasingly loud volumes over the years): If you call Joy Behar a bitch on national TV, they don’t let you lead a parade in Nashville anymore. Rap-rocker/human TruckNutz commercial Kid Rock found himself running afoul of that conventional wisdom this weekend, though, when he was booted from his prestigious post as Grand Marshal of the Nashville Christmas Parade after talking shit about the The View star during an interview segment with Fox & Friends.
Specifically, he said, “Screw that Joy Behar bitch,” shortly after launching into a miniature tirade about the evils of political correctness, because really, what else is Kid Rock going to talk about on live TV? Music? The Fox News hosts were, of course, shocked—shocked, we say!—that the Kid, that master of decorum, might have breached protocol in such a publicly uncouth way, issuing several apologies for the live incident. Behar, meanwhile, seems to have taken it in stride, saying on The View later that day that, “This bitch and these bitches will be happy to have you on the show and have a beer.”
None of this sat well, though, with the organizers of the Nashville Christmas Parade, who were probably already not absolutely overjoyed at the thought of having Kid Rock serve as their public face. (He owns a bar in Nashville that’s a major sponsor of the parade, so there you go.) Having found a good pretext for which to boot him from the proceedings, then, they immediately did so. Rock was replaced by “Waffle House hero” James Shaw Jr., who wrestled a rifle away from a gunman during a shooting in Tennessee earlier this year.
And while there was some suggestion that Rock and his associates might fight the decision—because if the combined might of all America’s tastemakers and music critics from 1998 onward can’t keep Kid Rock out of somewhere he’s not wanted, what’s a dinky little city council going to do?—but he eventually relented. He released a statement today, in fact, noting that while “My parade has been rained on!” he still supported the event itself, and especially the work of the Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, which had a float in this morning’s festivities. It was actually kind of sweet, especially since he managed to not, like, pick a fight with Sheryl Underwood from The Talk while doing so.
Anyway, we’re sure all of this will someday make for a charming little information kiosk somewhere in the Kid Rock Presidential Library (Mall Of America edition).