Kiss: Successfully Crass Since 1972

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Loud, greedy, gaudy, and crass, Kiss stands for everything that the people who hate America think that America is. They are like a metaphor, a symbol. Kiss is your Wal-Mart and Burger King-strewn highways, your Black Friday sales of merchandise that nobody really needs, your loud and bombastic right-wing talk-show hosts. They are led by a lecherous bass-player who lives with an ex-Playboy model who has become popular in his own right due to a reality-TV show. They wear face paint, something usually used to appeal to children, they affect a child’s notion of evil, with monsters and hellish clowns. Their music is simple, at their best sounding like a very average garage band playing nursery-rhymes and Sesame Street songs with lyrics designed to cater to 14 year-old boys to whom sex is the only emblem of adulthood (losing your virginity being your badge of manliness), at worst sounding like show-tunes. Bad Andrew Lloyd Webber.  

To their fans they are a memento from the days when they were young and this band was a about safe rebellion. Men who painted their faces could terrify parents back then. It makes them feel young again, allows them to stand in a crowd of others like them, a generation of people who were once as stupid. These are the people who needed somebody to tell them to rebel, which is the very antithesis of rebellion, but it’s the closest that people like them ever come, so they get to pretend. You date yourself and signal your level of sophistication by the Kiss memorabilia that you possess. It’s brilliant marketing, though. Identify your market and adopt an image that they will enchant them, that will give those naive, sheltered kids what they want. They ripped off Alice Cooper and added their own twist to compensate for and distract from their lack of musical talent. It is no surprise that Gene Simmons has taken such a strong stance against so-called “music piracy”. This band, at it’s core was always about marketing, selling stuff. It was never ever supposed to be about music.

Entrenchment
No amount of criticism can ever hurt Kiss. They are here till they start losing band-members, and even then they will probably replace them and carry on, the remaining original members running the enterprise. Eventually the band will continue on like a family business (Established in 1972) fanship passed down in a family like a genetic defect. The fans don’t care that it’s crappy music or that they are being exploited. Middle-income America (and upper-income everywhere else) is accustomed to exploitation, they relish it. They are the target demographic for everybody who wants to sell something, like some kind of tasty and defenseless prey. Kiss, like Wal-Mart, is here to stay.