N.W.A. vs Kiss ...
- Thread starter T.M.P.
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Okay, I'm sitting here shanti, imagining you at an NWA concert in LA circa 1988 and it's just not workin for me. vbg..
Yea, to each his own and all, but I really have a problem with Gene fking Simmons acting like he's some kind of respected musician instead of a dress up clown with a long tongue.
It's really not about who's better, just sayin. Though NWA are much better artists based on creativity alone. Kiss was paint by number and a pop act. .
Music is a audio art form, and Gene was a complete poser. Literally a poser. Fact: His posing was more important to Kiss' *cough cough* music than his playing. That makes him a joke. He should know his place. Clown acts should never speak ill about other people's art.
Edit: it would be like Flava Flav bitchin' about Page.
Fun story. My uncle is a good ol' country boy. He likes rock, too, but five bucks says the radio in his Camaro is set to a country station right now. Anyway, he's a huge fan of that Gourds cover of Gin and Juice. After he listened to that, he started listening to other rap songs being covered by non-rap acts, and even asked his daughters about some of these hip hop artists. He listened to some, and still hates it, but he'll tell you now that he has a deeper appreciation for just how good some of them are as musicians, and that the only reason he doesn't like them is that they just aren't the right genre for his tastes.
Exception: He loves Snoop. Absolutely adores him. But I don't think that's the music; I think it's the persona. I think he loves Snoop because, of all the hip hop artists, he's the one most likely to be in a bus passing a joint to Willie, and there's nothing my uncle would rather do that smoke up with Willie.
Okay here's one.
My friend Bill, who currently is a lobbyist for renewable energy and fuel (I am so proud of him.) was in Pasadena where he was living - while consulting on LAX.
During the yearly gay pride parade his car breaks down. While walking a limo pulls up, filled with what he thought (considering the parade) was four 50 year old crossdressers or drag queens out of costume.
The oldest and (he thought) queerest of the four asked him in a too many cigarettes voice if he wanted a ride. Bill, being a good naive midwestern boy from Iowa, declines politely and very uncomfortably.
Just before the Limo pulls away the oldest crossdresser hands Bill four tickets .. four backstage passes to Kiss. Do you get who was in the limo and who the oldest too many cigarette queen was. LOL ....
Destroyer was my first album...mom got it for my birthday when I was in the 2nd grade. It was okay (loved Detroit Rock CIty, King of the Nighttime World and Do You Love Me) but didn't really hook me until my 2nd Kiss album, which was their first and where I should have started.
It doesn't surprise me that Beth was messed up because on the MTV Halloween Unplugged cd it's always been off...and now I know the story. Which surprises me because that CD is really, really good. Paul is at his best and they have Eric Singer and Kulick in place of Peter and Ace. Paul was never much of a guitarist so I don't bust his balls too much for that.
I didn't hear what Gene said about NWA. Doesn't surprise me it was douchy.
Kiss has always just copied and traced whatever trend was going on at the moment...and somehow they were able to not get completely ripped apart like they should have. They stole their image from the New York Dolls and Alice Cooper, their first album is a dark sider Beatles wanna be, live albums get to be popular...Kiss does 2. Concept albums are a trend...Kiss did Destroyer and The Elder. Rod Stewart got fire hot...Rock n roll Over is basically a Rod Stewart album (dry, rock n roll). Disco gets hot...Unmasked and Dynasty. Big hair 80's metal....Lick it Up and everything the rest of the 80's. Grunge....Kiss does Carnival of Souls in the 90's.
Once Gene completely took over they became less of a band and just a brand...which sucked because I still say their first 6 albums were really good, straight forward rock n roll albums.
Did you know that Eddie Van Halen, when throwing one of his tantrums asked Gene if he could join Kiss? Wonder how that would have sounded....and I wonder how long that would have lasted. Lol
I don't disagree with you, I just wouldn't enjoy much of the NWA show.
If you would have said Snoop or Kiss, I would have chosen Snoop. I like some of his stuff.
In general rap does nothing for me outside of a handful of songs.
I've always thought NWA is overrated. I think Dre is kind of a hack, and Ice Cube is the only real talent in the group. The best thing they had going for them is timing. They are studio gangsters for the most part, and they kicked down the door for a lot of awful music/culture as it relates hip-hop. NWA made one respected album that has 5 or so good tracks: Dopeman, F the Police, SOC, Gangsta Gangsta, and one other I'm forgetting. The rest of that album is almost unlistenable. Compare their discography to Public Enemy's and it's laughable how much better PE is.
I know I'll get killed for saying Dre is a hack. He is a great businessman first and foremost. Ice Cube was the visionary.
I think it's strange to put NWA in the Rock & Roll hall of fame, but WGAFF at the end of the day. I guess I'm going with Kiss on this one.
I know I'll get killed for saying Dre is a hack. He is a great businessman first and foremost. Ice Cube was the visionary.
I think it's strange to put NWA in the Rock & Roll hall of fame, but WGAFF at the end of the day. I guess I'm going with Kiss on this one.
Express Yourself has a sweet Charles Wright sample.....
Eazy E's solo album gets lumped into NWA, IMHO. Some good classic stuff there.
100 Miles and Running and She Swallowed It are decent tunes...
That's an under-appreciated VH album
I'm with you. Though I mentioned yesterday that I liked a few of their riffs, I always recognized them for what they were even then. KISS was a brilliant marketing ploy. But to confuse what they did with art would be ridiculous, and Gene should just shut his mouth and count his money.
This whole time I thought you were black...
The dude wrote exceptional beats, he basically showed the world how to do them and everyone followed suit. There is no more influential person in rap, musically.. Yes, you deserve to be be killed for that remark. I don't think you really get how music is made or what it takes to make it.
There are small children throughout this country that can do what Gene Simmons did on a musical level. His aptitude in playing, creating and writing is novice at best. The only thing he did well was play dolly dress up, and stick out his tongue (Miley Cyrus can do that too) which has nothing to do with music. That cannot be said about Dre.
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Sure he sampled. But, the creative process is exactly the same as a person who composes and plays. Plus, every riff has already been done. There's only 7 notes (with variation) in the western scale, no matter if a person uses a riff from a recording or plays the same riff, that riff has already been used countless times. Jimi Hendrix didn't invent an A to B legato. It was when, where and how he used it that counted.
Obviously I'm partial to the sampled over the sampler.
Hip hop was my gateway to funk/R&B and even some classic rock (Beasties turned me on to Zeppelin).
It's hard for me to view sample-soaked hip hop as more original than the original songs being sampled.
Now...I loves me some sample soaked hip hop....take PE "Timebomb".....but once I learned it was lifted from a Meters tune...I started listening to a lot less rap and a lot more Meters...and Dr. John and any other New Orleans funk group.
Eazy E was comparable to Ice Cube, and Dre. was/is a great producer. His business, before headphones, was laying down beats and spotting talent. He's better at that than rapping, but that is just as much "artistic" as business.
Africa Bambatta, Jazzy Jay, Rick Rubin, Def Jam, etc all came before Dre. The entire Chronic album is direct rip offs of old soul/funk records and that was 1992. (Pete Rock, DJ Priemier, Bomb Squaud, etc. were all active). It's fun to listen to, but where is the genius in that? The Ice Ice Baby ripoff of Under Pressure sounds like a Dre beat.
Just my opinion that he's overrated as a producer. He had timing, and eventually resources in his side. If you look up anything he's done after the sampling laws hit, there are 2-3 other producer credits on every track meaning he got stuck when he could fall back on a classic sample that wasn't even chopped or used creatively. The Dust Brothers did Pauls Boutique right around the same time on the same equipment as Straight Outta Compton.
PE and NWA took rap from sounding Dr Suess childish and made it sound adult and professional. Dre especially changed what rap "music" would sound like for the next decade. As far as being a vocalist, that's not his thing. His thing was composition, arrangement and studio production. Studio production is one area where rap eventually overtook other forms. Dre beats and composition were basically copied and emulated by everyone.
Like I said, you have no clue what it takes to create a song. I get you like Kiss better. I get you like Slayer better than Jane's (another silly comment you made based on not understanding the art) but you don't understand what artistic creativity is (you only know what you like) and it's very evident in your first paragraph. You may like or dislike music, and think you have an opinion but without any fundamental understanding of it, well..... Therefore your opinion is purely subjective and arbitrary at best and in no way can you judge competency or proficiency. It's like judging how good a person can dribble, without ever dribbling yourself, (Basically your Tom Crean) And after the Ice Ice baby comment, I would suggest getting checked for tone deafness.
Dre is to rap what Hendrix was to rock. The dividing line. Pre Jimi all songs were acoustic compositions and arrangements played on electric instruments. He was rocks first real "electronic" composer. After Jimi all rock music sounded different. Rap is the same, Dre was rap's first real musical composer, everything after him sounded different. They are the Jesus Christ of their respective forms. BH AH for rock timeline. BD and AD for rap.
I think this is right. I'm on my phone and will be short, but... you mentioned cartoonish. You can still hear a tinge of some of that in Straight Outta Compton. The back ground beats are kind of like Nintendo computer games on a few tracks. Plus, there are songs songs like Express Yourself which are still in the vein of that easy going 80's hip hop style.
Looking back it's easy to take your finger and point to NWA and SOC... partly because of who was in it and because of the title track.
But fast forward a couple years to about 92 and the gangsta rap style was full on, propelled by Dre' s the Chronic. There were others like Too $hort who had been working in relative obscurity that would find national fame with a similar style at about the same time.
I was young, white, and in the Midwest so I'm sure I was the last one to hear it (ironically making my demographic a decent guage of when something became mainstream), but I remember it mostly as "Aint Nuthin but a G Thang" followed closely by Snoop's 1st track on Doggystyle (Gin and Juice??) and then boom.... it was on... Tupac, Biggie and a bunch more.
So yeah.... kind of before Dre and after Dre.
Chronic is the definitive line. That's where it all comes together. And just to get this straight, it's not like Dre (or Jimi) invented the T or the H or the I or the N or the G. They weren't working in an isolated vacuum without influence from other (then) present and past artists but they put it all together and made the "thing". When all of your peers copy the thing, well, that's true creativity.
When I first heard it my first words were "Rap just grew up". Kiss apparently never has, I see them as a form of bubblegum pop. Maybe the topic matter was more edgy than singing about teenage love, but they sold and played to the same age demographic, if not gender. It was basically bubblegum pop for males.
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Too Short was way before Chronic. I picked up his tapes Born to Mack and Life Is....my sophomore and junior years in 1988 and 1989. I Ain't Trippin was my HS anthem.
I consider Too Short old school. NWA and the offshoots were sort of the new west coast awakening. gangsta rap.
Dude - when I was born, they took me home from the hospital to Chrisney. Go Wildcats! Beat Hickory!
I lived off of what they are now calling county road 100. Other than the playground beat down, I enjoyed living there.
I knew some screwballs from Tell City once. Ed Mayhew and HF Smith. They were probably a little older. We went to Boy Scout camp at Philmont together 30 years ago.
Those names are not ringing bells. I graduated in 87, but Homercles may know them.
He was, but commercially I don't think he was very successful until after the Chronic made that style popular. Definitely not until after SOC.
His early sound was pretty raw. His later, more popular albums (I liked get in where you fit in and cocktales) , used smoother beats and sampling, imo. I'm not sure he would've made it as big if Ain't Nuthin But a G Thang never makes the constant rotation on MTV for a year straight. Just speculation, though.
Just as an aside, I think that Oakland sound was always a little distinctive from LA and the East Coast. Throw E-40 and a couple others in that small but similar group of people releasing gangsta rap albums at the same time but independent of Dre.
I refuse to go to concerts anywhere KISS played.
I do NOT wanna rock-n-roll all night or party every day.
Who cares? -- Gene Simmons is a gazzillionnaire, and all of us are not.
Most of the tools on this board bought multiple albums or paid for concerts from a group that basically had no talent other than wearing silly-ass makeup, and screaming worthless tunes. And oh by the way, Simmons pulled any trim he wanted.
I wish I was that much of an idiot.
NWA is much more talented. Not even a contest. But I would rather be KISS/Gene Simmons back in the day
Most of the tools on this board bought multiple albums or paid for concerts from a group that basically had no talent other than wearing silly-ass makeup, and screaming worthless tunes. And oh by the way, Simmons pulled any trim he wanted.
I wish I was that much of an idiot.
NWA is much more talented. Not even a contest. But I would rather be KISS/Gene Simmons back in the day
Well, that was the crux of the whole conversation, so thanks for participating.
As to the rest, I'm sure Dre is richer. Ice Cube possibly, too. And I doubt they had trouble pulling any tail... especially no stringy haired, blonde hair, blue eyed, pale skinned buttermilk complexion. Grafted, recessive,
depressive, ironing board backside straight up and straight down. No frills, no thrills, Miss six o'clock, subject to have the itch, mutanoid,
caucazoid, white cave b¡tches.
You're welcome FL33!! Glad to add my two cents.
Dre and Cube are only richer because of the passage of time, and the other things's they've don (especially Cube aka Doughboy). I was just musing because everyone rightfully says how much they suck, yet most bought their albums and attended their concerts. I wish I sucked that bad.
I like the way you wove in the Cave Bitch lyrics...
Dre and Cube are only richer because of the passage of time, and the other things's they've don (especially Cube aka Doughboy). I was just musing because everyone rightfully says how much they suck, yet most bought their albums and attended their concerts. I wish I sucked that bad.
I like the way you wove in the Cave Bitch lyrics...
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