Kid Rock Wrote a Verse About Jesus, Performed It at a Super Bowl Alternative Show — and Ended Up With the “No. 1 Song” in America
Kid Rock has the “number one song” in America.
Not with a new original. Not off the back of a stadium tour or a major label rollout. He got there with a cover of someone else’s country hit, a faith-driven verse he says came to him in a moment of spiritual clarity, and a halftime show performance that wasn’t even broadcast on live television.
By Monday afternoon, the song “‘Til You Can’t” — released at midnight, less than 24 hours after he performed it at Turning Point USA’s “All-American Halftime Show” — sat at No.1 on the all-genre iTunes chart.
It’s Not Even His Song
The song is not Kid Rock’s. It’s a Cody Johnson hit from 2021 — a ballad about not letting life pass you by that won two CMA Awards and a Grammy for Best Country Song. Kid Rock added a verse. In it, he tells listeners to dust off their Bibles, find the man who died on the cross, and give their lives to Jesus while they still can.
He says the verse came to him on a Sunday morning, weeks after the assassination of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in September 2025. “Someone or something spoke to me,” he told the audience, “and told me there was still a verse missing from this song.” He first performed it at Arizona’s Hondo Rodeo Fest in November, filling in for Cody Johnson, who was recovering from a burst eardrum. Johnson and the songwriters — Ben Stennis and Matt Rogers — gave their blessing for Kid Rock to record and release it.
How We Got Here
The TPUSA halftime show was billed as a patriotic alternative to Bad Bunny’s official Super Bowl performance. Turning Point USA organized the event after backlash from conservative audiences over the NFL selecting a Spanish-speaking, Puerto Rican artist as its halftime headliner. Kid Rock framed it plainly in an interview beforehand: “He’s said he’s having a dance party, wearing a dress, and singing in Spanish? Cool. We plan to play great songs for folks who love America.”
The show streamed on YouTube and several conservative networks. At its peak, roughly 6 million viewers were watching concurrently. Bad Bunny’s halftime show, by early estimates, drew well over 100 million — potentially an all-time high, though official ratings had not yet been released.
About That Performance
Variety later reported that the TPUSA show was pre-taped in Atlanta. Turning Point USA never officially confirmed the location or whether the performances occurred in real time. During Kid Rock’s opening number — his 1999 hit “Bawitdaba” — viewers noticed his mouth appeared out of sync with the audio. Accusations of lip-syncing spread immediately. Even the Trump-friendly outlet Next News Network criticized it: “Charlie Kirk would not have approved of Kid Rock’s pre-recorded Lip Sync Super Bowl performance.”
The lip-syncing concerns did not carry over to “‘Til You Can’t,” which by all accounts was performed live.
Not Everyone Was Impressed
The reactions split along predictable lines — and a few unpredictable ones.
Others online questioned what the iTunes ranking actually proved. Critics pointed out that Bad Bunny has roughly 85 million monthly Spotify listeners compared to Kid Rock’s 5 million, and that iTunes — a platform most of the music industry has moved past — is a narrow lens through which to declare any kind of victory. “What chart are you citing?” became a recurring line of skepticism across social media, with some arguing that celebrating an iTunes win in 2026 is like winning a race nobody else signed up for.
TPUSA, for its part, declared victory. Spokesman Andrew Kolvet told Fox News: “That’s a shot across the bow, people are paying attention. This was a massive success.” The organization confirmed plans to stage another alternative halftime show in 2027.
President Trump did not attend either event. He took to Truth Social during the Super Bowl to call Bad Bunny’s halftime show “a ‘slap in the face’ to our Country.”
And Yet
When the dust settled on Monday afternoon, the iTunes chart told its own story. Kid Rock was at No 1. Cody Johnson’s original version of the same song was right behind him at No 2. Bad Bunny — the man whose halftime show may have broken viewership records — was at No 3. Gabby Barrett, another TPUSA performer, rounded out the top six with two of her own singles. The entire top of the chart belonged to the counter-show.
Image credit:@kidrock/Instagram
Kid Rock thanked Cody Johnson and the songwriters on social media. “It really is one of the best written songs I have heard in a long time,” he wrote, “and NOTHING is more powerful than a great song in my book.”
iTunes isn’t the Billboard Hot 100 — but it is a real-time snapshot of what people are actually spending money on. And on Monday, February 9, 2026, Kid Rock — with someone else’s song, a verse about Jesus, and a pre-taped performance that may or may not have been lip-synced — was what America was buying.
