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.
“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.”
We attempted to tell him that groups like Pearl Jam and Radiohead found tremendous success after 1988. “If Thom Yorke walked down the street in Pasadena, what would happen?” he asked, before balking at our notion that people would notice. “I think you’re delusional. I’ve been with Dave Grohl when he was walking down the street, and nobody knew, and he’s a big star. No, that’s not what a star is. Prince was a star. You could see him coming from a mile ahead. There are successful artists. Pearl Jam, by any standard, is very successful.… How about this: More people would know Mötley Crüe walking down the street than Radiohead.”
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.
“Peter had nothing to do with that song,” he told YouTube’s Professor of Rock. “He sang it.… The mythology of ‘Beth’ is exactly that: mythology. The real story is Peter was lucky enough to be in the same place at the same time as a guy who wrote a song called ‘Beth.’”
Criss fired right back. “Gene wouldn’t know how the song was originally written because Gene wasn’t there from the conception of the song in the late ‘60s and he wasn’t there for the completion of the song with Bob Ezrin,” the drummer told Billboard. “Gene’s statements are ridiculous and very uncalled for; he talks about things that he doesn’t know about.”
Anthony Orosz*