The classic 1981 Kiss song that is shallower than a puddle: “Isn’t one of my favourites”
The 1980s were an uncertain time for many musicians, even established and successful ones like Kiss, but with waning interest in their music and even less in their image, the challenges they faced were especially difficult, forcing them to make decisions they’d look back on and regret.
The band’s 1980 record Unmasked placed them between a rock and a hard place, with poor sales numbers that forced them to make a handful of uncharacteristic decisions – one, of course, was touring extensively outside of the US for the first time, mainly to promote the album beyond their established market and keep people engaged when interest felt especially rocky.
The problem with Unmasked wasn’t that it was bad; it just didn’t feel like a quintessential Kiss record, with the band opting to lean into a more pop-adjacent sound to appeal to a more mainstream audience, and while this decision carried over into their image, they weren’t pulling nearly the same numbers as they once were, meaning the stakes were high in ensuring the next era was even more successful.
After all, even though numbers rarely equate to the quality of art, the figures around Unmasked were pretty diabolical. For instance, sales dropped well over half compared to those accumulated from 1979’s Dynasty, and it also marked the first-ever Kiss album to fail to reach platinum since the mid-1970’s Dress to Kill. People felt they were becoming sell-outs, which, all things considered, is a pretty reasonable analysis when looking at the sort of music they put out at the time.
As a result of this backlash – and recognising that what the people wanted was for their familiar, beloved Kiss to return, not this strange, watered-down version – they returned to the studio to make Music from “The Elder”, aiming to return to their heavy rock roots and once again prove themselves as serious, credible rock ‘n’ roll musicians who were still very much capable of creating a great, stadium-ready anthemic record.
However, recreating more of the same wasn’t going to cut it either, and so the band recruited Bob Ezrin once again to help them deliver hardcore rock ‘n’ roll with a punch. As such, it was decided that not only would they create heart-thumping rock anthems that would surely guarantee their rejuvenation as the era’s biggest and best rock stars, but they’d deliver it within the framework of a concept album, packaged as though it were the soundtrack to a big blockbuster movie.
Still, despite all the building blocks in place to make Elder the band’s magnum opus, it didn’t really gain the traction they wanted at the time. In fact, the record landed with an even worse response than people hating it, which was that people didn’t actually really care that much. Some reviews were relatively positive, but it ultimately failed to perform commercially, with some critics later reflecting on it as quite possibly one of the worst albums ever made.
Even though there are some parts worth listening to – if only to understand the trajectory of Kiss’ career better – most of it ended up feeling a little sonically disjointed and thematically misguided, which, considering what they were aiming to achieve at the time, doesn’t really scream the kind of defining 1980s concept rock triumph they were desperate for.
Reflecting on ‘I’ to Louder, Paul Stanley later expressed his dissatisfaction with the song and that period of time, saying the record “isn’t one of my favourites” and that ‘I’ was an “attempt to write an anthem” but which ultimately lacked “any gravitas” and sounded more “like a commercial”. In any other instance, it’d be easy to argue that the song deserves more credit, but this time, anything related to Elder feels infinitely harder to defend.
