It’s more like the devil’s hard-feeling hole.
Gene Simmons is once again criticizing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for allowing hip-hop artists to take a seat at rock’s most exclusive club.
The 76-year-old KISS co-founder, who was inducted into the Cleveland Rock Hall of Fame with his band in 2014, appeared on the LegendsNLeaders podcast last week and flipped the script on host Ben Weiss, asking him which band helped him grow the most.
After the 25-year-old host revealed that he was drawn to more “hip-hop-adjacent stuff” when he was younger, Simmons exploded the genre and gushed about the rap star being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“This is not my music,” said the rocker, whose stage persona is “The Devil.” “I’m not from the ghetto. I don’t speak my language in the ghetto. And as I’ve said in print many times, hip-hop doesn’t belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, nor does opera or the symphony orchestra.
“Why isn’t the New York Philharmonic in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?” he snorted.
Simmons doubled down, exasperated that while hip-hop pioneers Grandmaster Flash is in the Hall of Fame, metal giants Iron Maiden still aren’t.
“They can fill stadiums and Iron Maiden aren’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” he said.
The “Rock ‘n’ Roll All Night” singer then revisited his feud with Ice Cube over Ice Cube’s opinions on hip-hop.
“Ice Cube and I had an argument,” the Kiss frontman said, adding that he thinks the “It Was a Good Day” rhymer is “a bright guy” and respects his past accomplishments.
“He retorted that it was the ‘spirit’ of rock and roll…What I want to know is when Led Zeppelin will be inducted into the Hip Hop Hall of Fame.
“Music has labels because it describes an approach. Rap, hip-hop, in general, is spoken word art,” he continued. Then you put a beat behind it and someone comes up with a musical phrase, but it’s verbal. There are also some melodies, but by and large, it’s verbal. ”
The outspoken rocker has long slammed Hall for supporting hip-hop, causing a rift between the “Detroit Rock City” singer and the rap mogul.
When gangster rap legends NWA were inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2016, MC Ren told Simmons in the group’s acceptance speech, “Hip-hop is here forever. Get used to it.”
This came as a direct clapback to a 2015 Rolling Stone interview in which Simmons said he was looking forward to the “death of rap.”
The KISS bassist isn’t the only legendary rocker to be dissatisfied with hip-hop.
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards once quipped that the genre was “too wordy, so little said,” and in a 2015 interview with the New York Daily News argued that the genre caters to a “tone-deaf” audience.
“All they need is a drum beat and someone screaming along to it and they’re happy. There’s a huge market for people who can’t differentiate between one sound and another,” Richards said.
Psychedelic rock icon and Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia also said in the documentary History of Rock and Roll in February 1995, months before his death, that “rap is not music.”
“This isn’t music, it’s talking. That’s rap. Rap means talking. It’s talking in metres. It has rhythm,” Garcia says, though he doesn’t have a problem with the genre as a whole.
