Somethin's Happenin' Here #1 (Oct-21-22)
Somethin's Happenin' Here #1 (Oct-21-22)
And what it is ain't exactly clear, so let's talk about the midterms! And in the Music Box: Coming out of the Kiss-fan closet...
WHAT’S HAPPENING: The midterm elections are a little over two weeks away. The general consensus is that Republicans have the edge to take the House and possibly the Senate.
It feels like we’re just shrugging our shoulders, and/or throwing up our hands (and/or just plain throwing up) at the thought of this election, like the last one and the one before it, being called the Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes.™ But as former GOP operative and head Political Orphan Chris Ladd argued convincingly—four years ago, mind you, during the 2018 midterms—2022 kind of is our most important election ever.
It’s the whole “Nothing short of American democracy itself is on the ballot” thing, man. A lot of folks on the right want to make it harder to vote. Many election-denier candidates are prepared to ditch early voting, absentee voting, mail-in voting…and more importantly, they would like to give state legislatures the power to certify votes. Super-important purplish states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona have legislatures that tried or are talking about trying to overrule the system and decide themselves what votes count and what votes don’t.
That all sounds kinda bad to me.
The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade seemed to energize Democrats over the summer. Until recently, it looked as though Dems might very well buck tradition and retain their control of Congress on November 8—despite midterms almost always going against the party of the president.
But over the last couple weeks, continuing economic woes began to overshadow reproductive rights, as well as all other hotbed issues (health care, violent crime, immigration), for Americans of all political stripes. And since there’s still this notion out there that Republicans are the authority on no-nonsense economic issues, as the Pew Research Center’s latest findings suggest, Republicans now have the upper hand. Their self-branding over the years as responsible stewards of the budget and the economy has held.
But this is not your father’s (and certainly not my father’s) Republican Party. It’s the “Republican Party” in name alone. Best I can tell, they’re all but exclusively in it for the rich and powerful, and the corporations. I’ve seen absolutely no substance to the arguments that Republicans are the ones who know how to lower inflation, get food and gas prices down, make housing affordable, etc., etc. (And if there is a GOP’er out there making a substantive case for themselves who I’ve missed, please throw a link to some evidence in the comments!)
Trae Crowder, “the Liberal Redneck,” appears to share my outlook, and is much funnier in illustrating it:
If we were living in 1979, I’d understand the inclination to vote Republican, even if it meant supporting someone you didn’t think reflected your values or overall interests. “Sure, he’s a jerk, but if he’s going to shore up my finances then I’m voting for him anyway—no room to mess around in this awful economy.”
I don’t think Democrats have great answers, either, when it comes to digging out from inflation and such. But compared to Republicans, at least some of their hearts are in the right place. As Trae says above, “voting Democrat is your only choice” if you want to give the country a fighting chance to do something about the economy that’ll actually make average everyday Americans’ lives better.
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By 1984, Kiss were bringing in outside writers like Desmond Child (“You Give Love a Bad Name,” “Livin’ la Vida Loca”) to give themselves a better shot at some hits. But “Burn Bitch Burn,” whose pre-chorus lyrics are excerpted above, was all Gene Simmons. No outside writers needed to conjure up “I wanna put my log in your fireplace!” Believe it or not, Gene wrote that all by himself.
“Burn Bitch Burn” was the third song on the album Animalize, which was my first Kiss record (and the second heavy metal record I ever purchased to Quiet Riot’s Metal Health). My first exposure to Kiss, though, came when I was 4 or 5. I must have seen a commercial for the Kiss dolls, which were released during the band’s kabuki-style make-up heyday. Because when Mom and Dad told me they had a surprise for me one fall afternoon after kindergarten, and they took me out to the country to pick out a stupid cat? I was so disappointed. I thought for sure they were getting me a Kiss doll!
I don’t think I understood Kiss were a rock band. In fact, I probably didn’t fully comprehend what a rock band was. I just knew Kiss were, somehow, a group of real-life super heroes.
Five years later, as my mom and I were checking out at the Murphy Mart one day, there in the magazine rack was Hit Parader, with Kiss’s Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley on the cover. I finagled Mom into buying it for me, and the next day I had her take me to the Sound Shoppe to buy Animalize, the album they were hawking in the magazine.
So by then I vaguely knew they had been a band that used to wear crazy make-up, and now the make-up was off. But I had no idea about “Detroit Rock City,” or the hit ballad “Beth,” or even the “rock ‘n’ roll national anthem,” as Paul likes to call it, “Rock and Roll All Nite.” No, my first exposure to the band that would overtake Men at Work as my very favorite music group, and inspire me more than anything else to play music, and tour, and try to “make it” as a musician, was:
“I’ve Had Enough (Into the Fire),” a fast, heavy Paul song about hangin’ tough and bending the rules to make it;
“Heaven’s on Fire,” a Paul/Desmond Child number (and thus the hit on Animalize) about a young lady who was so “hot” she could “bring the Devil to his knees”; and then
“Burn Bitch Burn.”
So, lotsa fire, then, boys?
Apparently the whole “Burn Bitch Burn” song was little more than a vehicle for that “log in your fireplace” money line. Gene had been sitting on it for a while and unsuccessfully tried to work it into a few other tunes. But with “Burn Bitch Burn,” he finally got it on an album. Eeesh.
At 10 years old, I knew stuff about sex. Kind of. I mean, I had HBO. And on really lucky nights I could tune the cable box that was on top of the 10-inch black-and-white TV in my room to Cinemax and peer through the scrambled static to make out a few mildly lurid D-movie softcore scenes.
So Gene and Paul were laying claim to my pre-pubescent psyche at just the right time to ensure I’d be a fan for life. Kiss is dialed into my DNA now, in a way that the Beatles or Harry Nilsson (my favorites nowadays) could never be. There’s no physiological way I could ever quit Kiss.
Unfortunately, every Kiss era includes a few examples of near-sexist, misogynist-adjacent, or just plain gross lyrics. You’ve got your “Love Gun,” of course, from the ‘70s, the truly abhorrent “Let’s Put the ‘X’ in Sex” from the ‘80s (Paul’s even admitted to being embarrassed by that one), and “Take It Off” from the ‘90s, just to name a very few.
And it’s just a damn shame, you know? Because musically I would put Kiss up against any hard rock guitar band out there. No, Paul and Gene were not stellar instrumentalists—nor certainly were the other two original members, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss—but the riffs and the melodies and the hooks of the ‘70s, especially, and (in my biased opinion) the early-to-mid-’80s, too, were pure magic, dammit!
But to music snobs, they’ll always be the clowns that were all about the make-up and the fire and the blood and the explosions and the rocket-shooting guitars and the drums that levitated to the rafters. And their music? Just lunk-headed dinosaur rock with painfully chauvinistic lyrics.
And yet. They’ve still maintained—for a whole half-century!—the most rabid fanbase this side of BTS. And while some of the moves they made musically over the years were more about commerce than art, it’s still kinda mind-boggling they tackled so many genres. They’ve taken on classic heavy rock, guitar-based pop rock, disco rock, prog rock, heavy metal, glam metal, and even grunge. (Just about every big grunge band listed Kiss as a heavy musical influence when the genre exploded in the early ‘90s.)
And, not that it makes lyrics like “Put your hand in my pocket, grab onto my rocket” any more palatable, but Paul and Gene have mellowed in their old age. Paul, in particular, has become something of a social justice advocate and political commenter on Twitter. And Gene gets easily misty-eyed over his family, his fanbase, and his country as the band gets closer to finally retiring from the road in 2023.
So…bottom line…I wouldn’t say I’m overly proud to call Kiss my all-time favorite band, necessarily. But if I could only take one album with me to a deserted island?
Well, it’d be Abbey Road, obviously. But if I could take two albums?
If I could take two albums they’d be Abbey Road and Harry Nilsson’s Son of Schmilsson.
But if I could take three albums, album No. 3 would have to be a Kiss record. Probably the prog-ish concept album they made in 1981 to pander to the music critics, Music from the Elder. Paul and Gene despise that record. But it’s so so good.
And no raunchy lyrics, either! The words are straight out of a Lord of the Rings novel. Check it out.
Yours,
~Dean
P.S. - Here’s me trying to sing “Heaven’s on Fire” with Kiss at the Indianapolis Kiss Konvention right before Gene and Paul reunited with Ace and Peter in the mid-’90s. I forget the words, and then dutifully announce that I’d forgotten the words. The camera’s never on me, but it’s fun to watch Gene’s puzzlement, and eventual acceptance, of my helium-voiced approach…