How Kiss lyrics ruined rock and roll
In the golden age of rock and roll, lyrics seemed as important as the guitar licks. Even though acts like The Beatles could have sung anything over their songs, John Lennon’s wit matched Paul McCartney’s whimsy and made for magic whenever they got into the studio. Although the 1960s was home to a handful of exceptional1 lyrical feats, Kiss were never interested in sounding smart to the public.
When the band formed in the early 1970s, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were looking to put together a band that they had never seen onstage. Adopting horrific makeup and playing the heaviest rock and roll they could, the band quickly garnered notoriety as one of the era’s most horrifying bands while also making a handful of dents in the singles charts like ‘Detroit Rock City’.
While Kiss may have been able to put on a fantastic live show, the lyrics were a completely different story. Compared to the Bob Dylans of the world back in the ‘60s, the songbook of Simmons is littered with some of the dumbest lyrics ever to be put in a rock song. From casual misogyny on ‘Love Em and Leave Em’ to paedophilia on ‘Christine Sixteen’, Simmons sounds like a sex pervert on every song he puts out, ogling over any woman that comes his way.
Even if it’s meant to play up ‘The Demon’ persona of his character, there’s no way to separate the artist from the art on most of the tracks, especially given Simmons’s various tales about his sexual escapades. Unfortunately, Stanley isn’t much better in the lyrical department on half his material.
Compared to Simmons, Stanley tends to at least know what he’s doing a lot better. Across a handful of Kiss cuts like ‘Detroit Rock City’ and ‘God of Thunder’, Stanley knows how to knock out a great hook and deliver a chorus that millions of fans can scream to the rafters. When he strikes out, though, the lyrics are the most wretched part of the song.
Since the band’s favourite topic always comes back to sex, even Stanley can’t defend the band’s more egregious cuts, hating what happened to songs like ‘Let’s Put the X in Sex’ and ‘You Make Me Rock Hard’. Considering the movie had already been out, those titles feel like the songs that Christopher Guest would write into This is Spinal Tap, only being played dead seriously.
Even in their glory years, the band’s habit of writing around the title also didn’t help matters. Take a track like ‘Got Love For Sale’, for example. While the song is acceptable from a musical standpoint, Simmons desperately tries to find enough lines to fill the verse before returning to the chorus because he has nothing else.
Then again, Kiss’ reign of terror wouldn’t be felt until years later, with the hair metal movement later making lyrics like this half of their songbook. No matter how many times Simmons might sing about his sexual escapades, it would only get more pathetic listening to acts like Warrant trying to do the exact same thing towards the end of the 1980s.
Kiss even managed to mess up a handful of great artists by association. Even though no one is going to dispute Lou Reed’s pedigree in the world of rock, hearing him have a songwriting credit on tracks like ‘A World Without Heroes’ makes the whole art of lyric-writing sound cheap from the man who wrote ‘Sweet Jane’ and ‘Perfect Day’.
While Kiss lyrics might have ruined rock and roll for a while, it wouldn’t be that way for long, with Nirvana coming in to blow everything out of the water. Though Kiss were going through their own renaissance in the early 1990s, Cobain begging to be entertained by something that wasn’t all flash put a firm stake through Kiss’ usual model.
Although Kiss would continue as a live staple to this day, it seems that grunge completely screwed up their normal approach to making records, only putting out four records since the early ‘90s, many of which played it safe by singing about the pleasures of rock and roll. Kiss is more of an institution than a band these days, but anyone going to one of their shows should be more concerned with the spectacle than anyone’s lyrical prowess.
