Longtime Rock & Roll Hall of Fame critic Gene Simmons — who was inducted as a member of Kiss back in 2014 — has once again blasted the organization for honoring hip-hop acts. (Rolling Stone report)
“It’s not my music,” he told the LegendsNLeaders podcast. “I don’t come from the ghetto. It doesn’t speak my language. And as I said in print many times, hip-hop does not belong in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, nor does opera or symphony orchestras.… How come the New York Philharmonic doesn’t get into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Because it’s called the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”
“Ice Cube and I had a back and forth,” he continues. “He’s a bright guy, and I respect what he’s done.…He shot back that it’s the ‘spirit’ of rock and roll.… So Ice Cube and Grandmaster Flash and all these guys are in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I just want to know when Led Zeppelin’s going to be in the Hip-Hop Hall of Fame? Music has labels because it describes an approach. By and large, rap, hip-hop is a spoken-word art. Then you put beats in back of it and somebody comes up with a musical phrase, but it’s verbal. There are some melodies, but by and large, it’s a verbal thing.”
This is far from the first time such an argument has been put forth. And when N.W.A were inducted into the Hall of Fame back in 2015, Ice Cube told Rolling Stone why the notion is so wrongheaded to him. “Rap is a piece of rock & roll, but there’s also a piece of soul, a piece of R&B, a piece of blues — all of that music that comes before it,” he said. “I think rap captures the spirit of rock & roll just like rappers and guys who do rock & roll capture the same spirit, but they might go in different directions with it. But it’s the same spirit.”
Simmons also believes that rock & roll is dead. “There will not be another Beatles,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “You can play the game, 1958 until 1988 is thirty years, Elvis, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Madonna, Prince, Jackson, U2, AC/DC, maybe Kiss, and from 1988 until today, give me the new Beatles.”
Kiss have largely been on hiatus since they played the final show of their farewell tour in December 2023. But they played a couple of non-makeup gigs at the Kiss Kruise Land Locked in Vegas fan event in November 2025. The three surviving founding members made a rare public appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors the following month. In typical Simmons fashion, he shattered the goodwill just weeks later by saying that Kiss drummer Peter Criss didn’t actually write “Beth,” his signature song.
"Mistake" is one of two previously unreleased studio tracks on the new box set, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the band's third album with a disc full of alternate takes and two complete, unedited 1975 concerts from the same tour that resulted in the band's career-making Alive! album.
