Kid Rock knows something that you and I don't. He's figured out the secret—the dirty, nasty, well-kept secret of American life, which is that rednecks, in general, have more fun than uppity liberal folk like me. If you're a redneck, you're not dropping $2,300 a month to live in a Park Slope utility closet. The radio plays songs you actually like. You're not waiting in line for hours to eat at a trendy restaurant that doesn't take reservations, because Applebee's is A-OK with you. Also A-OK: cheap, mass-produced beer. Plus, you get to shoot guns all the time. It's a remarkably enjoyable lifestyle, and the annual Kid Rock theme cruise, officially called Kid Rock's Chillin' the Most Cruise, now in its fourth year, is meant to be a raucous celebration of it, with Rock—a man who countrified the concept of "keeping it real"—as its Pied Piper.

There are 2,435 of us sailing out with Rock from Miami on the Norwegian Pearl, and only 1,001 are here for the first time, including me, which explains the virgin tag that will be hanging around my neck for the next five days. The remaining 1,434 passengers are returning for their second, third, even fourth time. They get tags that say VETERAN. It's an astonishing retention rate, and it explains why more and more musicians are ignoring stereotypes about cruises being a floating graveyard for washed-up acts. Not all of them succeed—Sugar Ray's '90s-nostalgia cruise was canceled in February. But when you find the right match of artist and audience, miracles (and nudity) can happen.

From Miami, our cruise will sail to Great Stirrup Cay in the Bahamas, a tiny island owned by Norwegian Cruise Line that can be dressed up as a different island every week, depending upon which theme cruise is coming to port. Last fall, it served as headquarters for the KISS Navy. This week the cay will be rechristened Redneck Paradise (after the Kid Rock song). Then we head back out to sea for one more night before arriving back in Miami, where we will hopefully arrive free of Legionnaires' disease. Two years ago, Kid Rock's cruise was held aboard the Carnival Triumph, a vessel that became infamous this past February when its engine died at sea and it had to be towed to Alabama, with passengers shitting into paper bags and subsisting on onion sandwiches. (This year's Kid Rock cruise is on a different boat. "I can't believe my name didn't come up in that," he will tell me later. "I was waiting for it to be like, 'Kid Rock pooped on that boat!' ") With any luck, the Pearl will spare us such indignities, because we have other indignities planned.

The ship is huge. HUGE. It's the kind of ship you gawk at from the highway. It's nearly 1,000 feet long and fifteen stories high. For our voyage, it has been stocked with 26,000 eggs, 357 gallons of ice cream, 8,000 pounds of beef, 1,484 pounds of cheese, and 643 pounds of coffee. There's also 12,568 pounds of fruit, none of which will be eaten.

I walk to my room along one of the ship's many vast hallways. There's a door-decorating contest going on all week, and the passengers are putting everything they have into it. One cabin door is festooned with a dozen old Playboy centerfolds. Another has a sign blaring JAM OUT WITH YOUR CLAM OUT. In the hallway, I pass by one woman alerting a crew member named Carlos for help dragging her shitfaced friend back to their cabin. "Carlos, we got a drunk one here!"