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| From | Gregory Sager <hochsalzburg@yahoo.com> |
| Subject | Re: Why Kiss and not Dolls? |
| Date | Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:09:21 -0700 (PDT) |
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Steve Alter said:
"Don't you think it's a punk/pop-metal thing? It all sounds so tame now, but Dolls were pretty snarling and aggressive at the time, even though they were bringing a pop aesthetic to the Stooges wall of noise. Kiss, on the other hand, made metal safe for the kids, by adding anthemic pop to the mix and putting it all in a cartoon wrapper. I love 'em both, but for totally different reasons."
****
Speaking as a former '70s teen who was very much into Kiss during the band's glory days, I think that Mike Bennett and Robert Stupay were closer to the truth. Mike's right that Kiss was building upon the foundation of a previous gold-selling hard rock act with regard to theatrics and presentation -- Alice Cooper was never far from a mention when the subject of Kiss came up, and Kiss's detractors in study hall and the cafeteria inevitably dismissed them as "four guys copying Alice Cooper" -- wheareas the New York Dolls really had no previous referent that was readily identifiable in the popular teenage consciousness. Plus, the male adolescents of middle America have never really been apt to fully embrace the overt androgyny that was offered up by acts like the New York Dolls (Twisted Sister's Dee Snider was a silly joke, not a rock icon). Big hair and platform shoes notwithstanding, Kiss exuded the sort of ladykiller machismo that is de rigueur among hard rock acts.
And Robert was right about Kiss's commercial appeal being much bigger than that of the Dolls. As he said, Kiss wrote hooky anthems tha fit in perfectly on mid-'70s American radio alongside Grand Funk, BTO, and Foghat. The Stooges-meet-the-Brill-Building melange offered up by the Dolls was so novel that it didn't really have a ready reference in terms of the public ear. David Johanson & Co. were thus doomed to follow in the footsteps of the Velvet Underground and Big Star as a critically-acclaimed band that was nevertheless commercially out of sync with its era.
Kiss wasn't a metal band. All of the stoners I knew, the guys who were into Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, sneered at Kiss as being a bubblegum group. Nor was Kiss "safe" in the cultural sense; since parents hated them, Kiss was able to live up to Little Richard's First Commandment of Rock'n'Roll. Of course, the New York Dolls would've been ten times more of a threat to parental sensibilities than Kiss ever was -- but since the Dolls never got off the ground in terms of drawing a wide audience and thus coming to the attention of the parents of American teenagers, it was a moot point.
Greg Sager
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