10 Bands Destroyed By "Selling Out"

Boy howdy, did Kiss master the art of selling out. The New York sleaze rockers went from hyperbolically satanic hedonists with a penchant for face paint to devilishly keen capitalists quicker than you can say “Primark t-shirt deal”. At one point in his career, Gene Simmons must have been signing commercial contracts in his sleep, snoozing away with a pen in each hand and his hosepipe-like tongue coiled around another.

There is literally an officially-licensed piece of Kiss merchandise for just about any occasion. Having a kid? Get them a Kiss onesie. Don’t want a kid? Wear a condom with Simmons’ face on it. Planning on dying? Spent eternity in the comfort of a Kiss casket. Want to waste your money on a meaningless piece of junk because you have more disposable income than sense and are completely unaware that things like world hunger and homeless dogs exist? Why not buy a literal bag of nothing creatively marketed as Kiss ‘air guitar strings’? Seriously, man.

And that’s without all of the ludicrous televisual tie-ins too. Who could forget such classics as Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery, or their ill-fated foray into the world of professional wrestling with band-endorsed WCW flop, ‘The Kiss Demon’? The line between the ridiculous and the genuine is so blurred that I literally just had to google ‘Kiss Saves Santa’ because I didn’t know if it was real or just a Family Guy sketch. (It’s the latter, by the way.)

So congratulations, Kiss, you truly are the kings of selling out. Your cheque is in the post.