“You can’t find a new big rock band – they don’t exist”: Gene Simmons explains why rock music is no longer “fashionable”
Kiss‘s Gene Simmons has argued his reasoning for why rock music is no longer as “fashionable” as it once was.
Speaking with Tom Cridland, host of the Greatest Music Of All Time podcast, Simmons explains that the driving factor behind this decline in “new big rock bands” has more to do with who the fans are and the business point of view than the music itself.
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He clarifies that rock music is “still vibrant in stadiums across the world”, with bands like Iron Maiden and Metallica still performing live and attracting big audiences.
However, Simmons now believes new big rock bands no longer exist, which has to do with “who the fans are”.
“The people that buy rock are predominantly white,” Simmons says [per Blabbermouth] Although it’s still vibrant in stadiums across the world – [Iron] Maiden does very well live and Metallica and so on, but these are old, old bands. We took Iron Maiden on their first tour. We took Bon Jovi on their first tour. We took AC/DC on their first tour.
“You can’t find a new big rock band,” he goes on. “They don’t exist. Name one, if you can think. Foo Fighters, it’s a big band, and that’s 30 years ago. And that has to do with the fans, who’s buying it. So once you could get that music for free, the business model stopped working.”
On why pop and rap music are more commercially successful in this day and age Simmons justifies this as being because of “younger pop fans, predominantly – there are so many great pop singers”, citing Ariana Grade, Dua Lipa, and Taylor Swift as examples.
He goes on to explain the various business models associated with different genres of music, depending on the target audience. Taking rap music as an example, he explains, “you can actually sell some units if you’re a rap band, because it’s culture. Rap is culture, not just music. In fact, it’s more culture, often racial culture, because it talks about ‘us’ – ‘us against them’ or ‘the world against us’. And when culture gets into it, like a football team — football or soccer or whatever you wanna call it is not as much a sport as it is flying the colours of ‘my team.’”
This isn’t the first time rock and metal musicians have broached the subject of their genre’s decline in popularity. For example, Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French recently made similar claims. He suggests the lack of new rock musicians demonstrates the loss in this genre’s prevalence among today’s young people.
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