“Cowboy” by Kid Rock

"Cowboy" is Kid Rock tipping his hat and flipping the bird at the same time, a track from his fourth album, Devil Without a Cause, that Atlantic sent out as the record's fourth single in August 1999. He wrote it himself and produced it with John Travis, and it welds a lazy country twang onto a hip-hop strut and a big rock crunch, with Kid Rock bragging about heading west to California and setting up shop as a pimp.

It gets tagged as the first country rap song, and plenty have pointed to it as a seed of the country music that came after. It also gave him his first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit number five on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, and Metal Hammer later counted its video among the best of the nu metal age.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.