Genre labels are generally innocuous until a person sets out to reposition the signposts. Gene Simmons has come back to an old complaint concerning the “Rock & Roll” Hall of Fame: that the organization should cease to consider rock and roll as an umbrella. On the LegendsNLeaders podcast, the co-founder of KISS, who was inducted to the band in 2014, expressed dissatisfaction of the Hall noting hip-hop artists, but put the problem into perspective by making it a question of definition. “It’s not my music,” he said. “I don’t come from the background. It doesn’t speak my language.”
The objection put forward by Simmons is not as much denying the cultural weight of hip-hop but rather the category drift of the Hall. He reasoned that when this building is named “Rock and Roll” then the induction reason must be along the lineage of the fans of the guitar based music that they refer to when the term is mentioned. He cited the ability of the Hall to honor acts like Grandmaster Flash and in his perspective ignore institutions of rock at the stadium level as a case in point citing Iron Maiden not appearing in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In Simmons, the expansion of the influence of the Hall makes a credibility issue: the plaques begin to resemble not so much the history of rock but a mood board of a committee. “when is Led Zeppelin getting into the Hip-Hop Hall of Fame?” line is supposed to reveal the unbalancedness he perceives in that growth.
His description of the structure of hip-hop is crass and old-school: “By and large, rap, hip-hop, is a spoken word art,” he said, is a contrast to melody-based rock writing. He has classified the genre question along with other hypothetical boundary-pushers such as opera, symphonies, orchestras, and pleaded that excellence is not all that makes everything “rock.” The labels are important to Simmons since they are the means of explaining an approach, or the label will turn it into a branding exercise, and not a musical map.
It is not a premise that everyone accepts. Ice Cube rebelled against the concept of hip-hop as an outsider to the house of rock when N.W.A. came to the Hall, declaring it an heir. “Rap is a piece of rock & roll,” he told Rolling Stone, which puts it on a family tree alongside blues, soul and R&B. In a subsequent induction speech, he presented the case even more explicitly: “Rock n’ roll is not an instrument,” where he refers to it as a spirit that manifests itself in all of the styles, including hip-hop.
The most recent wave of criticism focused on Simmons’ choice of wording who people interpreted as more than a mere catchphrase. In a follow up he said, I mean what I say and that the origins of the word were Jewish before it became a common word in America. He also stressed on lineage: rock as Black music, hip-hop as another kind of Black music, and American popular music as something that can not exist without Black musicians. His stand, he claimed was not contempt but categories, respect of hip-hop and refusal to refer to it as rock.
In the meantime the counter-argument continues to develop. Upon the subdivision of rock into sub-genres and new movements, Chuck D pitched Simmons as a man obsessed with the Rock and forgetting the Roll by stating, “Everything else is the Roll.” In that reading, the fact that the pool of inductees to the Hall is so broad is not mission creep, but a long-overdue acknowledgment that the rebellious drive that was once the rocking force is not eternal life.
This is not the first time that Simmons has claimed this, as he has insisted that the star-making era of rock is over decades ago. The Hall controversy continues to re-emerge due to the same reason, it is not about who was invited to the guest of honor of a particular institution but rather in defining the boundaries of a culture that never ceased to mutate.
