Friday morning, country-rapper and living fedora catalogue Kid Rock took a break from selling golf apparel to tweet about Taylor Swift wanting to be in movies and sucking doorknobs. “Taylor Swift wants to be a democrat because she wants to be in movies….period,” Rock wrote. “And it looks like she will suck the door knob off Hollyweird to get there. Oldest move in the book. Good luck girl. -Kid Rock.”
The digital grunt came a day after Swift addressed her long-held and oft-criticized political silence for the first time. Swift, who appears on the cover of Vogue’s September issue, told an interviewer that she’d withheld a political endorsement in 2016 not because of her significant conservative and alt-right-leaning fan base, but because then-candidate Trump had “weaponized” the idea of the celebrity endorsement. “He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you,” Swift said. “I just knew I wasn’t going to help.”
The comment offended Rock, who has been vocal about his admiration for Trump and Trump-adjacent things like the Confederate flag. The tweet-signer responded by implying that Swift, who has been famous since she was a teenager, had slept her way into celebrity. It was a hollow jab, and not just because Swift’s ex-boyfriends trend more Disney Channel cast-off than high-powered movie exec.
Rock has long presented himself as a rough-and-tumble country guy who does average-Joe-guy stuff like shoot guns, trap hogs, and dunk on hippies. He often talks about his path to success as a scrappy blend of self-taught skill, business savvy, and persistence. “I was a hustler from a young age,” Rock told Cowboys & Indians in 2015. “Whether it was selling tapes out of my basement and designing T-shirts or setting up my own light show and traveling around this country for years with a U-Haul trailer and a minivan.”
But what gets lost in that portrait is the fact that Rock’s humble origin story took place on a luxurious estate in wealthy Macomb County, Michigan. Rock, whose real last name is literally “Ritchie,” grew up the son of millionaire William “Bill” Ritchie, who owned several lucrative car dealerships, and Susan Ritchie, who instilled in Rock “a spirit of philanthropy.” They raised Rock, who once claimed to be “straight out the trailer,” on six well-groomed acres, where he could pick fresh apples from his family’s personal orchard.
According to a real estate article in the Detroit Free Press, when Rock’s “ancestral seat” went on the market in 2016, it asked for $1.295 million. The “neo-Georgian colonial” house spanned 5,628 square-feet (with a 1,811 square-foot lower level), and held four bedrooms, four bathrooms, an indoor Jacuzzi room, a “giant” fireplace, and two garages for the family’s five cars. If the house, dubbed “Apple Crest Farm,” ever seemed too cramped, a young Kid Rock could have taken a walk to the family’s large on-site guest house—or their private, two-stall horse stable and tack room, or their personal tennis court.
According to the Detroit Free Press, Rock’s father also owned a second home in Jupiter Island, Florida, down the road from Celine Dion and Tiger Woods.
For her part, Swift also came from significant wealth. She grew up on a Christmas tree farm near Reading, Pennsylvania. Her mother worked in finance; her father, as Lizzie Widdicombe wrote in the New Yorker, is “a descendant of three generations of bank presidents” and “a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch.” Her parents moved to Nashville to support her burgeoning music career, and even bought stock in Big Machine, the label which later signed Swift.
Swift has been slightly more forthcoming about her history (she told Widdicombe of her hometown, “it mattered what kind of designer handbag you brought to school.”). But if Rock really wanted to knock her, he might have started with what they have in common.
