Damage Case #5: Bikini Kill and KISS

First off, in honor of today being officially proclaimed Riot Grrl Day in Boston, I'm going to discuss Bikini Kill for a moment.

I first heard Bikini Kill immediately after hearing Minor Threat for the first time while on a road trip with my friend Shaun when I was in eighth grade.   Something that struck me immediately about them was that they were a contemporary band, aggressively and directly confronting contemporary issues.  It's easier to yell anti-Nazi, anti-Reagan, and anti-drug slogans in a room full of like-minded white boys than it is to confront and challenge an entire gender.  That was and is the definition of hardcore to me.  If you do not listen to, appreciate, respect and support what they did as a band and what they continue to do as individuals and musicians, you are not hardcore. 

Bikini Kill helped directly inform my worldview as a humanist.  If nothing else, they helped me to understand that as a white, middle class male in the United States, I need to acknowledge that I have had some really shitty attitudes toward women, minorities, gay and trans people ingrained into me and that I can do better.  Thank you for calling me out on my shit, Bikini Kill.   You helped me develop critical thinking skills in a way that no school ever could.


And now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, let's talk about KISS, which is what I originally set out to write about here.

I recently started listening to the first few Kiss albums after my autistic son, Frankie, began singing "Rock and Roll All Nite" and hearing my friend Gina defend them.

I never especially liked them when I was younger.

 My first memory of them involves staring at a picture of the original lineup in the back of what I believe was the third issue of Muppet Magazine (I did my homework here.  Muppet Magazine came out in 1983.  The picture was of the band in make up.  Kiss stopped wearing make up on September 18th, 1983, when Lick It Up was released.  Ere go, it was issue 3, which also had a Star Wars inspired cover, making it extremely likely to have been the issue in question).  My mother told me that they were evil or something and I'm pretty sure my sister told me that they were lame, so that was the end of it.

I'm pretty sure the first time that I actually heard their music was while watching Dazed and Confused in '94.   I remember liking the idea of Kiss at that point, but this was tinged with the knowledge that they had been performing without makeup for over a decade and had devolved into a forgettable buttrock band.

Their reunion and return to wearing makeup in 1996 didn't do much for me.  By that time, I was pretty much only listening to East bay punk and just saw it as a cash grab.

And then they just didn't go away and have continued releasing albums, touring and bragging about how many women they had slept with for another twenty years.

But really, now having actively listened to Kiss, Hotter than Hell, Destroyer, Rock and Roll Over and Love Gun, I get it.   Kiss were all kinds of awesome in the '70s.

Yes, every song is about fucking or having at least one penis.  There's an element of misogyny to the music that is hard not to cringe at, but there's far worse examples out there.    But if you can get past that, and just listen to the songs as examples of '70s glam rock, they're pretty fucking awesome in all their ridiculous stupidity.  The majority of their lyrics amount to "Euphemism for sex / Same euphemism for sex / Something that rhymes with Venus / let's get undressed / I have a penis / AIDS doesn't exist yet".  Their first album has a fucking instrumental track called "Love Theme from Kiss" that is literally an instrumental track for fucking.   Yes, their shit is that stupid.

Of course, if their ode to statutory rape, "Christine Sixteen", doesn't make you throw up in your mouth at least a little, there's something wrong with you.  But then again, Thee Headcoatees' "My Boyfriend is Learning Karate", Agnostic Front's "Public Assistance" and The Long Tall Texans' cover of "Get Back Wetback" piss me off, too.  It's a document of a moment in time when our culture was still pretty gross.  I prefer to confront such material, let it get to me for a moment and move on.

Ultimately, though, Kiss are a lot of fun.  I just prefer to think that their tour bus exploded in 1978 just after they finished filming Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, thus preventing the next thirty six years of suck.