Axl Rose’s damning view of Kiss: “Their music is second fiddle”
Every great artist will want to put as much of themselves into their music as possible. Even though it might be about getting audiences worldwide to respond to the music, the personal side of every song keeps them listening for years on end, as if the musicians left a piece of their souls on the vinyl. While there was no questioning the lifestyle of Guns N’ Roses seeping into their debut Appetite for Destruction, Axl Rose thought that one of their forefathers didn’t care about music.
When looking at the band’s origins, though, half of the appeal of Guns N’ Roses was to shock people. Compared to the rest of the hair metal acts that were clogging up the Sunset Strip at the time, the band stormed onto the scene looking like the punk answer to the glam pretty boys, infusing their riffs with the sounds of classic bands like The Rolling Stones and Cream.
Outside of the band’s presentation, though, Rose was interested in singing songs reflecting their state of mind. Throughout their debut, it’s easy to get a picture of the band’s everyday life as they scrounged for food in West Hollywood and tried to hang onto their sanity.
While the songs were shocking for their time, the first major shock to the system in hard rock had come a decade earlier. Off the back of shock rocker Alice Cooper, Kiss were already storming onto the scene out of New York City, with each member performing hard rock clad in horrifying face paint.
Although Kiss had made the daring decision to take the makeup off in the early 1980s, they had kept their nose to the ground in terms of any new talent. After bassist Gene Simmons helped give newcomers Van Halen their first big break when cutting their demo, Paul Stanley had a similar idea for Guns N’ Roses, only to be shot down when he suggested rearranging their songs.
While the band stuck to their proverbial guns, Rose had some harsh words for where he saw Kiss going for the past few years. As opposed to the spooky artists that sparked fear in parents and excitement in listeners in the 1970s, the frontman thought that the group were only interested in the bottom dollar rather than expressing themselves creatively.
When discussing the similarities between Kiss and Guns N’ Roses, Rose was far less diplomatic, saying, “I like Kiss in their early days. I think the only thing that we have in common with Kiss now is that they like to make money, and they like girls. But as far as their music goes, basically, their music is like second fiddle to their other desires while our music comes first”.
As the years passed, Rose was about to take Guns N’ Roses in a completely different direction style-wise. After making a gritty rock record on their debut, the Use Your Illusion double album would see the band pulling out every style in the book, being more eclectic than even KISS would dare on songs like ‘November Rain’ and ‘The Garden’. Guns N’ Roses may have been in a state of change in the early 1990s as KISS were in the 1980s, but no one was going to question if the music didn’t come straight from Rose’s tortured soul.
