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Alice Cooper has bit back at Gene Simmons after the KISS bassist recently claimed that rock music is “dead”.
Simmons first courted controversy with similar comments in 2014, and doubled down on the remarks in a new interview which arrived last month.
“Rock is dead. And that’s because new bands haven’t taken the time to create glamour, excitement and epic stuff,” Simmons told Gulf News.
“I mean, Foo Fighters is a terrific band, but that’s a 20-year-old band. So you can go back to 1958 until 1988. That’s 30 years. During that time, we had Elvis [Presley], The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones, on and on.”
He went on to suggest that popular bands exist, but that doesn’t mean they’re “iconic and legacy and for all-time”.
But Cooper sees the opposite, defiantly telling NME that a new generation of rock stars are currently preparing for greatness in their own homes.
“Gene Simmons – I would like him to do my taxes because he’s a businessman and that’s valid, but I guarantee you right now that in London somewhere, in garages, they’re learning Aerosmith and Guns ‘N’ Roses,” he said.
“There’s a bunch of 18-year-kids in there with guitars and drums and they’re learning hard rock. It’s the same with the United States: there’s all these young bands that want to resurge that whole area of hard rock.”
Discussing the state of rock music at large, he said the genre is “where it should be right now”.
“We’re not at the Grammys; we’re not in the mainstream. Rock’n’roll is outside looking in right now, and that gives us that outlaw attitude,” Cooper said.
He also praised the longevity of the genre and claimed it will still exist “some thirty or forty years from now.
“The one kind of music that started and never ended was hard rock. It went to punk, it went to disco, it went to hip-hop, it went to grunge, but the one thing that went through the middle of it was hard rock,” Cooper said.
Elsewhere in our interview, Cooper also opened up on the recent sexual abuse claims that have been levelled against Marilyn Manson.
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