Posted on 12/06/2024 8:47:31 PM PST by nickcarraway
Tony Soprano once famously said, “'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation.” This never dawned on Kiss’ Gene Simmons, whose recent “rock is dead” rant amounted to little more than waxing nostalgic about the days when his band ruled the roost — and revealed his ignorance and disinterest in the current state of the genre.
Simmons made his latest proclamation on an episode of The Zak Kuhn Show. When asked if he believed rock was still dead, Simmons replied: "It is. And people don't understand how I can say that when we all have our favorite songs and we love our favorite bands, you and I and everybody else. But what I mean is that — well, let's play a game, and I've done this before. From 1958 until 1988, that's 30 years. Thirty years. So what came during that period? Well, we had Elvis, we had the Beatles, the [Rolling] Stones, Jimi Hendrix, all that, Pink Floyd, the solo artists, David Bowie and just music that lasts forever, we'd like to think. In the disco world, you had Madonna, more heavy guitars, you had — oh, God — AC/DC and everybody else, Aerosmith and on and on. And you had Motown at the same time. You had Prince. It was a very, very rich musical menu. It could go up and down. You had prog bands, you had Yes, Genesis, Gentle Giant, and you had the heavy bands, Led Zeppelin and so on. And from 1988 until today — it's something like almost 40 years, certainly 35 years — who are the new Beatles?"
When Kuhn suggested Nirvana, Simmons interjected: "Stop. We are blinded. I'm a major fan. If you walked down the street and asked a 20-year-old, 'Who's the bass player in Nirvana?' they wouldn't know what you're talking about. Or, 'Can you sing a Nirvana song?' No, no. The Beatles — and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Stones and Elvis — everybody knew the Beatles. If you hated rock music, you knew about them. By the way, I'm delusional enough to believe some market reports about how the Kiss faces are the most recognized faces on the planet. And I've tried this before: You walk down the street, randomly ask people, 'Who's on Mount Rushmore?' They'll say, 'Uh, Elvis.' They won't get it, but they know those four faces anywhere you go. They may hate the band, but you can't deny that.”
It was a typically meandering and self-aggrandizing response from Simmons, and one that failed to offer any tangible evidence that rock is dead. Instead, it revealed that Simmons’ idea of a “thriving” rock scene can be commodified and sold on department store T-shirts around the world. Simmons is talking about rock as a corporate monolith that looks, sounds and acts the same as it did in 1977. There’s still a market for that, as evidenced by the many legacy rock artists who have announced massive tours for 2025, as well as young acts like Greta Van Fleet who have debuted inside the Billboard Top 10 and filled arenas off the strength of their classic rock cosplay. But this narrow, antiquated view of rock barely scratches the surface of the genre’s rich, albeit embattled, present-day ecosystem.
Simmons’ “Who are the new Beatles?” refrain is a lazy and irrelevant response to the discussion of rock’s current standing. For one, the Beatles were a one-of-a-kind sociocultural phenomenon that will simply never be replicated. (Taylor Swift may have made a similar global impact, but she operates in a music business and a world that is unrecognizable from that of the Beatles’ heyday, so it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.) Secondly, the 30-year period Simmons is referencing, when labels had endless money to blow on fostering up-and-coming talent, is a mere blip on the radar in the scope of music as commerce. It wasn't considered such a lucrative business enterprise before that, and it probably never will be in the same way again, save for the 99th percentile of pop superstars. The streaming economy has simultaneously democratized access to music, fragmented listenership and bankrupted small-to-midsize artists to the extent that a rock band cutting their teeth today has virtually no chance of achieving a whiff of the same success. They could be writing the next “A Day in the Life” as we speak, but it’s not going to sell 20 million copies, and it’s going to take some digging from avid music listeners to find. That’s a serious problem in its own right, but it’s not the problem Simmons purports to highlight here.
Furthermore, Simmons’ quick dismissal of Nirvana on the basis that no casual fan knows Krist Novoselic’s name rings hollow, considering the same casual fan would be hard-pressed to tell you who played alongside Simmons and Paul Stanley in Kiss for the past 20-odd years. His similar rejection of Pearl Jam, another one of Kuhn’s suggestions, ignores the inconvenient truth that both Nirvana and Pearl Jam outsold Kiss by at least five-to-one when you compare their highest-certified albums. (Pearl Jam’s Ten: 13 million. Nirvana’s Nevermind: 10 million. Kiss’ Destroyer: 2 million.)
Kuhn also offered up Foo Fighters as an example of a modern-day rock giant, to which Simmons argued that Dave Grohl has eclipsed both Nirvana and Pearl Jam’s popularity by becoming a Hollywood socialite, not based on his music. This, he claimed, is the same reason that Snoop Dogg remains more popular than “other rappers who might actually be bigger rap stars — M.C. Criminal or whatever, I just made that up.” This is, um, ignorant at best and racist at worst, but it makes Simmons sound bafflingly out of touch at a time when rapper Kendrick Lamar’s new surprise album GNX reigns atop the Billboard 200 and he occupies the entire Hot 100 Top 5 — a feat previously accomplished by only Swift, Drake and, that’s right, the Beatles.
If Simmons wants to lament the death of rock ’n’ roll as monoculture, he has some grounds to do so. But to proclaim the entire genre dead across the board shows that Simmons has no interest in looking outside his insular world. If he did, he might notice that Green Day — whose major-label debut Dookie was recently certified double diamond for sales exceeding 20 million — is headlining Coachella next year. He might realize that My Chemical Romance just sold out an entire U.S. stadium tour. He might see that Linkin Park and Pierce the Veil have hefty arena tours booked for 2025. He might marvel that genre-bending psych-rock weirdos King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have become one of the biggest cult bands on the scene, packing theaters and amphitheaters around the world. And if he really wanted to do his homework, he might take pleasure in the rock/punk/metal hybrid of bands like the Dirty Nil or White Reaper, who are dutifully making the rounds on the club and theater circuit the way old-school rock bands used to do. (For the record, either of these bands could have made great openers on Kiss’ farewell tour if the band didn’t take the easy way out and handed the gig to Amber Wild, led by Paul Stanley’s son, Evan Stanley.)
But Simmons doesn’t want to do that. He would rather complain that he and his retired boomer cohort no longer run the show, and if they’re not in charge, then nobody should be. He’s well within his rights to lament the death of rock to anybody who will listen — but he ought to know it’s the lowest form of conversation.
I listen to his Sirius/XM channel some.
and the bands are?
There are youtube videos blaming technology for making it easy to make music. They are all using the same samples so the music sounds the same.
In the olden days it was people making music with their instruments and a few microphones and a singer who could actually sing and not lip sync.
Today it is sterile as tech smooths everything out.
A snip snip here a snip snip there.
Rick Beato
4.65M subscribers
The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
The amount of tech used to make a music is amazing.
The Real Reason Why Todays Music Is Starting To Sound The Same
Freaking Out With Billy Hume
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZgPKGVJrdc
“His band never ‘ruled the roost’... Far from it. They were just a semi-interesting costume band with a few hit songs.”
I was mid-20s when KISS arrived on the scene. The radio stations I listened to (FM) never played a single KISS song. I never knew anyone that bought a KISS album, and nobody I knew ever mentioned KISS.
Back in the day they were a band for 13 or 14 year old males. That was ok, but for anyone out of high school they just didn’t exist.
BTW, the film ‘Detroit Rock City’ is pretty funny, about adolescent boys who idolize KISS, trying to get to one of their concerts.
:: complain that he and his retired boomer cohort no longer run the show ::
And there it is, another chance to bash the generation that changed the direction of American society, thank you very much.
Can you say “millennial weenie”?
Boomers gave millennials the chance to build on their successes.
All that happened was victimhood and nanny-state worship.
Bkmk
Saw them last month, show was awesome.
I subscribe to SiriusXM because of all the driving I do. Channel 33 is called 1st Wave and it plays new wave. They play this song often.
The only person I pay money to see is Alice Cooper. He always has an excellent performance.
thx...
Not only was Jesus betrayed by a KISS, he'd even warned everyone that the Stones would cry out.
He gets the last laugh though with stacks of the sketchy AMP Bible version.
You just watch... people will try to block their ears!
No. Gene Simmons is right. I can hardly think of a good rock band from the last 25 years. Where are they? All anybody can name are obscure bands nobody else has heard of. There really is no radio airplay of modern rock. There are tons of classic rock stations....because shock shock, people actually LIKE rock and want to hear it. But the music industry decided on their own at least a couple decades ago that they were just going to deny the audience what they wanted to hear and they were going to push insipid pop and (c)rap influenced music instead. A lot of country acts then slid over to somewhat fill the void such that modern country is a whole helluva lot more like light rock than the country music from 30-40 years ago was.
And I’d rather hear Petra’s God Gave Rock n Roll to You any day over Kiss’ version.
“Well, basically, I just started out to lead [an interview] with the most insulting question I could think of. Because it seemed to me that the whole thing of interviewing as far as rock stars and that was just such a suck-up. It was groveling obeisance to people who weren’t that special, really. It’s just a guy, just another person, so what?”
Lester Bangs - 1982
That has to be the best description of most modern country I have ever heard. That should be a term sued world wide.
The artist Five Times August has put out a great protest music video calling out all the artist who sold out during Covid including KISS. If you haven’t seen it, it is worth a watch….the video adds to the song in my opinion.
It’s my favorite song from FTA.
https://rumble.com/v3nptyg-aint-no-rock-and-roll-by-five-times-august-out-now.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp
PS…i was a KISS fan back in the day(hello 8 track tape) but Gene sealed my disdain when he demonized the unvaccinated.
Like you, I grew up with rock & roll long before it became “classic”. If I ever gave it up, what would I be giving it up for? The FM radio stations we had in Detroit were the best: 99.5 WABX, 106.7 WWWW (”W4”) and 101.1 WRIF. Plus, there was 88.7 CJOM in Windsor, Ontario. Yeah man, we sure had it good back then.
My first thought was this song and video, where Lenny Kravitz declared Rock & Roll is Dead nearly 30 years ago. I feel so old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw8_5OYKQNA
It’s not dead, but young people don’t limit themselves to one genre of music now.
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