Kiss of Death

I was never comfortable with rock and roll performers getting Kennedy Center honors, because the honors bestowed by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts - which was only named for John F. Kennedy, who found symphonies boring and preferred show tunes - because the honors were mostly (if not completely) meant for high art.  For music, that would mean classical music or other musical forms that aspire to high art, like jazz.  Rock and roll is not high art, and when it tries to be, the results can be pretty pretentious, as Emerson, Lake and Palmer proved trying to cover Mussorgsky or Copland.   I remember when Led Zeppelin got Kennedy Center honors, which made no sense at all because they were British, and the award was meant for contributions to the American arts - which, of course, means no rap, but rappers have gotten Kennedy Center honors too.   Someone like Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, who was also honored . . . well, he and his brothers were more pop than rock, and he's sort of a de facto American, having lived in Miami for fifty years . . . that would be a coin toss.

A lot of Kennedy Center honors went to performers who didn't deserve it before Trump returned to power, but now that he's back and he's made himself chairman of the board of trustees and appointed noted patrons of the arts such as Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo (this just in - she still can't talk), Usha Vance, Lee Greenwood, Dan Scavino, Susie Wiles, and Susie Wiles' stepmother . . . well, the choices for Kennedy Center honors for 2025 were expected to be very plebian.  And in that respect, the board of trustees did not disappoint, choosing to give Kennedy Center honors this year to no greater than five artistes, the main headliner being . . . Kiss!

Kiss!

Kiss, the infamous heavy-metal band famous for their painted masks (which they hid behind for nearly a decade), their loud, piercing riffs, their stupid misogynistic lyrics, and even the odd disco song! 

I can't of anyone less deserving than these talentless clowns to be given a Kennedy Center honor, and remember, rappers have gotten them.  The honoring of band whose songwriting never caused John Lennon and Paul McCartney or Elton John and Bernie Taupin to fret over their reputations as composers and whose entire stage act would have crumbled into a million pieces without their special effects because of their lack of genuine charisma is a slap in the face to everyone who worked for a national performing arts center to serve as a showcase for the best and greatest of the American performing arts.

And that's precisely the point.  The people on the board who supported Kiss are, in addition to hating  symphonies and operas, likely the same snotnose teenage boys who bought all their records back in the 1970s - even the solo albums - and want to get revenge on the "woke" honorees of years past as well as the previous trustees who quite smartly turned up their noses at their favorite performers.  I was a tween back then - the girls in the Kiss Army were even more insufferable.

Also getting an honor is Sylvester Stallone, whose fame rests entirely on his roles as Rocky Balboa and John Rambo.  Okay, Stallone isn't as bad an actor as people think, and he actually some good reviews for Cop Land and reprising his role as Rocky Balboa in the Creed movies.  But name another picture other than the Rocky and Rambo movies that garnered a lot of attention - Paradise Alley is not acceptable - and you'll see that his contributions to cinema, be it as an actor or director, are as thing as porridge.  

Oh yeah, there was Death Race 2000, the dystopian road-race B-movie that gave Stallone and Fred Grandy a path to mainstream success but not Roberta Collins, who should have graduated to A-list movies and, had she done so, would have given the sort of performances in serious films that could have gotten her a Kennedy Center honor had she lived (she would have been 81 today).  

As for the others . . . there's country singer George Strait, for the MAGA redneck types to don't like heavy metal. a performer described as the King of Country (actually, Johnny Cash was the King of Country, but let that pass), and actor Michael Crawford - a Brit? - primarily for him originating the lead role in The Phantom of the Opera, one of those schlocky Andrew Lloyd Webber works that Trump himself likes.  Okay, I can take or leave those guys, and Crawford deserves points for his role in the anti-war black comedy  How I Won the War, which also starred John Lennon (although that movie, as much as I enjoyed it, was thoroughly British).  But I cannot, for the life of me, understand the honor disco singer Gloria Gaynor, best known for her hit "I Will Survive" and her hit cover of the Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye."  That's it.  Make those two songs a double A-side, and you instantly have Gloria Gaynor's greatest-hits compilation.  As she is a black woman, I can only guess that she's a DEI honoree, brought to you by the folks who brought you anti-DEI policies.

No, Kiss remain the biggest insult to the idea of of honoring the best and the most accomplished of those in the performing arts, as they are all performance and no art.  Kind of like Trump.  But at this point, it's worth remembering that the Kennedy Center has long been a venue primarily for light-pop entertainment and touring stage companies.  The National Symphony Orchestra doesn't pack them in like the usual acts at the venue, and Washington isn't exactly known for having prestigious dance or opera companies that are the envy of America.  Honoring modern-dance choreographers or cellists at the Kennedy Center embodies who we want to be.  Honoring a heavy-metal band known for a fire-breathing, blood-drooling bass player and for song titles like "Lick It Up" shows us who we really are.