Last night, I watched a bunch of people take comedic stabs at Gene Simmons' career as I saw his roast on A&E.
I also saw the article saying he took stabs at Radiohead for having supposedly boring shows.
As much as Mr. Heim Witz is successful in the music business, through my eyes he doesn't have much room to talk saying that bands that don't put on electrifying shows have no place having concerts for their fans.
There are 2 things wrong with this statement.
1) He makes it seem like live shows aren't based on the music at all, its all about dressing up like a bunch of clowns on stage, coughing up blood, sticking his outrageously long tongue out of his mouth.
2) If you have to rely on stage makeup and stage moves to attract a crowd, then you aren't doing something right in the studio.
If you look at KISS and all the glam bands back from the 70s-80s, they all look and sound pretty much the same, and the lyrics are framed around three things mostly: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. This is why I personally didn't like the 80s mainstream scene(I of course wasn't alive, I just see millions of documentaries on it and hear a lot of stories from people at the music stores I hang out at), I prefer what the product of the underground scene was(Dream Theater, Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera) and stuff from before then (Frank Zappa, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd).
That being said, a lot of the bands I named thrived on pure musicality and attitude to draw the crowd. They didn't have to dress up in platforms and make-up, assless leather pants and black leather clothing. They created the attitude in their music where the band could just stand there and concentrate on playing the music, and the crowd would bust out headbanging while the band just stood there. If you don't think thats possible, watch the Gigantour 2005 DVD in the Dream Theater segment and look at the crowd bust out headbanging during The Glass Prison.
Another reason I disagree with Gene Simmons, he made it seem like music was only business, not a way or a reason to live for a lot of people. I know people personally that were dead on the inside and they listened to some music and decided it was so good that they would live on to see the future, but another counterpoint against Mr. Simmons is that when Kurt Cobain died, a lot of kids committed suicide as well, because they knew they would never hear the sound of Cobain's vocals with the sound of Nirvana again (at least in a new album).
You can run around stamping your name on every single materialistic item to get royalties for it. It's called SELLING OUT. It's unethical to do if you have a lot of fans that are in the music and not just the fact that they may be into whats popular.
I just figured I'd put my thoughts somewhere where they may be seen and commented on just to see what everyone else thought.
| My Profile
Gene Simmons...and how he's lost his musicality. blog
