Gene Simmons Admits KISS Look Was a Last-Minute Blackface Cover-Up, Trump Calls Him ‘Genius’
How a Nazi mix-up and blackface panic gave birth to KISS.
In a bombshell interview, KISS frontman and Trump Supporter Gene Simmons has revealed that the band’s signature look, and their entire existence, was born out of a last-minute scramble to cover up a poor decision.
“I panicked. It was Halloween in the early ‘70s, and I was going for this Aretha Franklin look. She was huge back then,” Simmons laughed. “Look, it doesn’t matter what I thought I was doing. The point is, when I was done, it was blackface.”
According to Simmons, now bandmate Paul Stanley walked in before he could wipe it off. In a moment of pure desperation, Simmons grabbed the nearest white greasepaint and started smearing shapes and patterns.
“Paul didn’t care about the wig, dress, or fake boobs. So I just kept adding white paint,” Simmons grinned. “I figured if I made it weird enough, no one would ask questions.”
The transformation worked. Perhaps too well, as Stanley was reportedly impressed.
“He looked like some kind of sexy demon mime,” Stanley smiled. “I was like, ‘Dude. I don’t know what you were doing at first, but this is your thing now.’”
Simmons says the “nail in the coffin moment of truth” was when he tried to defend the original makeup.
“I didn’t even paint my tongue black,” Simmons insisted while sticking out his massive tongue. “They have black tongues, right?”
Stanley said that when Simmons stuck all 5 inches out, everything changed.
“I didn’t know what he was talking about because who puts paint in their mouth? But that’s the moment we realized Gene had a freakishly long tongue,” said Stanley. “It was disturbing. It was inspiring. It was… profitable.”
Simmons agrees.
“It’s definitely where the missing inches my penis was supposed to have went,” he laughed while pointing at his mouth. “Straight to my tongue.”
From that moment of poorly disguised racism emerged one of rock’s most enduring acts: KISS.
In fact, to this day, Donald Trump calls Gene Simmons “an inspiration,” stating that, “The face paint is the art part of the whole deal. Gene uses the makeup, the tongue, it works! If you panic confidently, distract with your tongue, and smear on enough makeup, they’ll buy anything… No matter your penis size.”
As of press time, Simmons confirmed the band’s original name was simply “SS” — until a pivotal library trip revealed the title was already taken by a Nazi paramilitary group.
“We kept seeing KKK and SS together in all these articles,” Simmons explained. “So we figured, why not meet in the middle, throw an ‘I’ in there, and boom — KISS was born.”