Past Music Columns

A Hole in the Shape of “All Summer Long”

How Kid Rock’s rejection of iTunes let anonymous session musicians beat him on the charts with his own song.

By Miles Raymer

September 18, 2008

In our hyperlinked Web 2.0 social environment, anonymity is something you have to work at. When artists try to share their music but hide their faces—think Burial, Crystal Castles, or the Blank Dogs—it tends to read more as a conceptual-art stunt. But anonymity in earnest can be achieved, and the Hit Masters are proof. They apparently beam their recordings out of a Google-proof Internet black hole. They don’t have a Web site—or if they do, they don’t want anyone to find it—and they’re probably one of the only bands on the planet without a MySpace page.

But the whole point of the Hit Masters’ existence is to have no identity of their own. They’re a group of competent and perfectly faceless studio musicians, and they crank out collections of cover songs aimed at consumers who either don’t care who’s playing them (Kids Party Fun, for instance, or Rockin’ Halloween Party Music) or don’t pay enough attention to realize they’re not buying the real thing (compilations of country and new-wave hits with the original artists’ names conspicuously absent). So their recent appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 chart—not the usual turf of bands that cover “The Purple People Eater”—requires some explanation.

As is the case with so many other strange chart phenomena, the responsible party turns out to be Kid Rock. It all started with his decision to withhold his latest record, last year’s double-platinum Rock n Roll Jesus, from the American digital market. He’s not the first proven unit shifter to do something like this; Jay-Z refused to sell American Gangster through iTunes because it would allow customers to violate the sanctity of the album format by cherry-picking tracks (he let Rhapsody and Amazon sell it as a complete-album download). But Kid Rock’s motives are different—they seem to be a mix of respect-the-album nostalgia, animosity toward business models that enrich corporations at the expense of musicians, and good old-fashioned reactionary redneck attitude. In an impromptu manifesto he e-mailed to industry pundit Bob Lefsetz last month, the most coherent passage reads, “Itunes is convienient, but so is Mcdonalds, but . . . . . . . a lotta people still wait in line and make reservations to eat elsewhere!! Sometimes when you believe in yourself and your product, NO is the best answer.”

The upshot is that the country’s largest single retailer of music—digital and otherwise—isn’t selling Kid Rock’s hit single “All Summer Long.” Even without help from iTunes, it’s reached the top 20 on Billboard’s pop and country singles charts, and there are places where it’s been ubiquitous literally all summer long. (I’m from Michigan. I can point out several on a map.) A lot of pop stars are swinging for the lucrative country-music market—maybe you’ve heard Jessica Simpson’s “Come On Over”?—but Kid Rock is the only one of them who can really sing a country song. And it’s kind of a coup for him to break a mashup of “Werewolves of London” and “Sweet Home Alabama” on conservative country radio.

What iTunes is selling, as you’ve probably guessed by now, is the Hit Masters’ version of “All Summer Long.” In late August it reached number five on the iTunes single-song sales chart. By the end of the week it had outstripped Kid Rock’s version on Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at number 19 while the original was at number 25. (The Hot 100 weights sales heavily relative to airplay, which makes that possible.)

And the Hit Masters aren’t the only ones who saw a potentially profitable “All Summer Long”-shaped hole in the iTunes catalog: the Starlite Singers, Georgia Steamroller, the Southern All Stars, Spike, and Knightsbridge also have versions for sale. The Hit Masters’ has been the most successful by far—maybe because it comes up first in a simple iTunes search for the song—but as you might imagine, an ersatz hit has even less staying power than a real one. At press time Kid Rock’s version was at number 23 in Billboard; the Hit Masters had fallen out of the top 50.

Opportunistic pop covers aren’t a new thing. Back when recorded music was young and all the big hits still came out of Tin Pan Alley, every hot-selling rendition of a song begat a string of other versions. These days artists write so much of their own material that the public tends to attach a certain song to a certain singer—that is, if it isn’t a standard, most people think of one version as “real” and any others as impostors. But a fair percentage of songs by major-label acts are in fact owned by publishing companies, and they make money by licensing those songs, not by respecting anybody’s ideas about art. This is how the Beatles can seem to endorse products like Luvs diapers—when jingle companies can’t use the original recordings, they can often buy the rights to the music and redo the songs with in-house bands. And it’s also how a guy who’s built a career on good-ol’-boy summer jams can watch a bunch of anonymous session performers beat him with his own song.

As anyone who’s sung karaoke or played a terrible Guitar Hero knockoff knows, there’s a certain perverse pleasure in hearing a familiar hit drained of its best qualities. I’m not saying Kid Rock is an emotionally deep performer, but his reminiscing about liquor, chicks, and radio hits in “All Summer Long” at least feels authentic; hearing his stabs at earnest nostalgia repeated by an anonymous singer who’s only invested in the song as a way to pay his rent has a campy appeal. And the Hit Masters amplified that appeal by simply playing the Zevon and Skynyrd licks that the original song samples.

But few people who downloaded the Hit Masters’ version were looking for that kind of kick. They just wanted Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long.” The ersatz single has around 1,800 reviews at the iTunes Music Store, which average out to a one-star rating. Most reviewers obviously didn’t know about Kid Rock’s iTunes snub, but those who did weren’t impressed. “Kid rock is purposely not putting the song on itunes so that you have to shell out $15 for the whole album,” wrote a reviewer identified as jthe truth. “Download this version instead so it makes it higher up the charts than his own version. That will send a message!”

That message is being heard, if not by Kid Rock then by his label, Atlantic Records. Atlantic also handles Estelle in the States, and decided to pull her single “American Boy” (and the album it’s on, Shine) from iTunes in an attempt to boost CD sales. After it’d been gone about a week and a half, it was at number 57 on the Hot 100 chart—and a Studio All-Stars cover version was at number 52. Just days later, on September 10, “American Boy” was back on iTunes.   

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