Gene Simmons wasn’t much pleased about the new, updated picks of Rolling Stone’s annual ‘who sings better than who’ list. When a TMZ reporter asked the KISS bassist what he thought about the band’s exclusion from this year’s list, Gene didn’t hold anything back.
“Oh, I don’t give a f*ck. Really,” responded Gene when asked where he thought he would be on the list if Rolling Stones had included him. Simmons was then asked if people should care about such lists, and he was very clear when saying, “No, they shouldn’t. If you’ve got success, that’s enough.”
He continued by pointing out that if an artist had success and was loved by their audience, that was all that mattered. He said, “Accolades and all that, you get that when you do a concert or when fans come up. That’s the best thing. To be on a poll by a magazine by people in the backroom; I don’t know how much that means.”
Simmons also noted that it was okay that KISS wasn’t included in this year’s list. He sarcastically added, “Well, that’s okay. I was thinking of buying Rolling Stone. Well, it’s skewed. You have to consider who’s popular and who’s not. But if you really think about it, how good somebody sings may be part and parcel of what they do.”
The KISS icon mentioned, “For instance, if Jimi Hendrix, who had a long, well, actually a short career, but he was very famous, would he make it on ‘American Idol?’ How about Bob Dylan… And I wrote songs with Bob Dylan; I know the guy. Would he make it on ‘American Idol?’ How well you sing is not the most important thing. It’s, do you have style? Do you have a fingerprint that says, ‘I know that voice immediately?’”
The reporter then mentioned that Ozzy Osbourne had been placed as the 112th, so this pissed off Simmons once again. He commented, “That’s a crime. Look, somebody sits in a backroom, Jann Wenner and those guys, they sit in a back room, and they decide things. Nobody asked me. Did they ask you? Apparently not.”
Gene believed that musical geniuses like Hendrix or Dylan wouldn’t make it to the contemporary music scene or the popular TV shows because they didn’t fit into the industry’s current ‘talented musicians’ category. In the end, it wasn’t about lists or how well you sang, but it was about having a signature persona.
