On Gene Simmons being Gross

shes--like--heroin

Gene Simmons can fuck off with his copyrighting the devil horns bullshit. He claims to have created it, but he can’t even do it correctly. Fun Fact: Jinx Dawson of Coven created it and Ronnie James Dio popularized it.

leperwitch

This isn’t even counting how the “devil horn” symbol is a gesture used in numerous cultures around the world to ward off the “evil eye”, ie it’s mean to protect the person using it from evil and it’s not a manifestation of evil itself. Ronnie James Dio talked about this a lot during his career and there was likely a good deal of frustration on his part regarding how the gesture became misappropriated.

Gene Simmons wants to own every damn thing he’s come into contact with at any point in his career, whether it’s rightfully his or not. Kiss had some good songs but I don’t fuck with them as a band mostly because of how frustrating of a man Simmons is (although his son Nick is a great writer and I’m a fan of his work because he’s definitely not his old man).

TL;DR, an ancient multicultural symbol meant to protect people from harm shouldn’t have a copyright on it because some millionaire wants it for himself.

messed-up-metal

Okay, I’m going to start with my Kiss Army cred:

This was my family’s Christmas card from when I was ten. I’m Peter Criss. (This is also why I don’t make fun of Juggaloes as a group who are just looking to find people who accept them - I get it the Kiss Army is the exact same thing)
That’s from 1996, the year my parents took me to my first KISS concert. It was at the Anaheim Pond and it was LOUD and the FIRE WAS INCREDIBLE.
I got Super, Super, Super into Kiss.
Which made sense - my dad had been Super into Kiss since the 70s so we had Kiss branded stuff all over the house. There were laserdisc collections of their interviews and music videos, there were records and statues and masks and posters. We once went to a Tower Records as a family to try to buy tickets to an upcoming Kiss show at their Ticketmaster booth (the internet makes me feel really old, y’all) and a dude with a greasy ponytail talked my parents into following him back to his shop where he smoked a cigarette at his desk while he got us a better deal on closer seats than Tower had had available. That show was in Irvine, I think. With Skid Row and Ted Nugent. I was probably about fourteen.
One of my first battle vests had three Kiss patches on it. I had Kiss tee shirts both from when my dad saw them when he was a teenager and from the sale rack at Target (mom and dad why did you let me wear a shirt with a dripping popsicle on it that said “lick it up” that seems very inappropriate, way worse than the shredded jeans I had that you hated). We carved Kiss pumpkins at Halloween. My dad and sister were season ticket holders of the LA KISS football team. My family wants me to paint a twelve-foot-tall version of the Destroyer album cover with Santa hats that says “Merry Kissmas” for their holiday decoration this year.
Kiss is a band that makes decent, fun music to play at parties, they have a couple of pretty good songs. They have fantastic stage shows that are well organized and a lot of fun to watch. They’re an entertaining but not-great band. But Gene Simmons is a fucking marketing machine in a much larger way than he ever was a bass player.
Gene Simmons Family Jewels. The Kiss Coffin. The Kiss Coffee Table book (a book of life-size photos of Kiss the size of a coffee table). Kiss Hello Kitty. Kiss Condoms. The LA Kiss football team. There are a million Kiss products and at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if people have seen Kiss merch on sale everywhere even if they’ve never heard a Kiss song.
The makeup and the shock-rock thing was such a smart move on their part because it’s perfect branding, but it also means that it’s totally unsurprising that they’re more of a brand than a band now, and that Simmons is perpetuating that. It’s hard to do stage shows wearing platforms and armor in your sixties, but it’s easy to keep your name in the news for attempting to patent a hand gesture. Every few years there’s an attempt to drum up publicity - whether it’s buying an arena football team when the league is nearing collapse or trying to patent throwing horns or taking a lie detector test on live tv answering the question of how many women he’s slept with Gene always wants to keep his name in the news.
On one episode of Gene Simmons Family Jewels (ugh, why is everything with them a really obvious dick joke), ostensibly a reality tv show, Gene is visiting his mom. She’s a sweet little old lady who wants her 50-year-old son in bed at a reasonable hour and bought footie pajamas for her boy. So Gene sneaks out the window of his bedroom in footie pajamas to a waiting limo to go party until the wee hours of the night. In one way I suppose you could look at this as a tremendous piece of performance art. It’s a setpiece that’s obviously false in a show that’s nominally real performed for an audience that is meant to believe it completely in order to mock it. Or it’s meant for an audience of dedicated fans who won’t question the silly things their leader of choice does because at least some of it is real and they get unprecedented insight into his lifestyle and habits.
Gene Simmons comes across as one of the most cynical celebrities around. He’s incredibly savvy about the fact that even his failures add to his brand. No wonder he was on The Celebrity Apprentice, no wonder he’s talked about how he admires Donald Trump for shaking things up.
No wonder he sees band mates with mental health and addiction issues as replaceable. They dilute his brand.
Gene Simmons isn’t a horrifying monster. He’s a skeevy old guy who has spent the last fifty years singing about his dick and ditching anyone and anything that doesn’t add to his sphere of influence and collect residuals for him. Of course the person trying to patent a multicultural hand gesture turned into a symbol of rock by a talented, dynamic musician is Gene Simmons.
He doesn’t have anything else to offer at this point he’s gotta churn his name into the news somehow, and this is how he’s gonna do it.