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Talk about irony.

Kid Rock’s most recent album, 2007’s “Rock N Roll Jesus,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200, his best showing ever. The album’s lead single, “So Hott,” hit No. 2 on the Mainstream Rock chart, the highest he’s ever been on that index.

Yet it’s easy to argue that he is less important in popular culture than he was a decade ago.

When he hit it big, he was a throwback and a hybrid all at once. He blended Motley Crue, Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Run DMC and Hank Williams Jr. into an intoxicating blend of music.

Most people were still riding the wave of overly produced singles from boy bands and pop tarts. Urban angst had triggered a wave of highly stylized hipsters into the recording studios. Yet Kid Rock remained decidedly blue collar.

But since he’s followed the life paths of his musical idols, including marrying Pamela Anderson, the former wife of Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee. The marriage seems to be the moment when he hit both the peak of his pop culture popularity and when he jumped the shark.

Although he has fallen out of the spotlight, Kid Rock has maintained a sizeable fan base. “Rock N Roll Jesus” got mostly good reviews and is closing in on being his fifth platinum record, in part because as Rolling Stone said “roaring guitars, truckloads of attitude and an unquenchable lust for life make up for a multitude of sins.”

With close to 22 million total albums sold, though, it’s hard to dismiss Kid Rock. Doubly so when you take into account that he was, at one point, so popular that his DJ spun off his own album of bad folk-pop and sold another 2 million records.

Since then he’s become a caricature of himself, a bold and bloated icon of the late ’90s music scene that passed so quickly you have to wonder if it ever really took hold.

Rock ‘n’ roll is often about a lot more than just writing good songs. And as Kid Rock knows all too well, if you can’t write great licks, you can always just appropriate them.

Kid Rock wasn’t the first to mix rock and hip-hop together. Korn and like-minded metal-rap acts had jumped on this idea in the early ’90s.But they all focused on the speed and anger the spoken word allowed.

Kid Rock’s sound was more ambling, a lot of sing-song and definitely about a different sort of angst. Instead of feeling disengaged with society, his lyrics expressed a longing for a society that was passing him by. He had a factory-worker mentality that was overwhelmed in a increasingly technology-driven world.

So he resorted to partying, nostalgia and repeating his name enough to make rapper Mike Jones look like he could stand to do a little self-promotion.

And it worked. America wanted a flawed everyman pop star — someone who drank too much, partied too hard and wasn’t afraid to talk about things like alimony and child support.

But like anything else, new train wrecks overshadowed his persona and we became more infatuated with Eminem, who took things a step farther by being a legitimately good white rapper and all around disaster outside the recording studio.

Like Fred Durst before him, Kid Rock was left to fall into the abyss of former celebrities. They are waiting their turn before becoming reality TV stars, like Bret Michaels.

In the meantime, Kid Rock is still going to tour. He’s still going to promote his blend of rock ‘n’ roll, country, hip-hop and the blues with the same devil may care attitude.

Who knows? Now that we’ve forgotten about him, maybe he’ll have enough to get us all excited again.