Rolling Stone’s list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time has caused a lot of controversy since its release this week, and Gene Simmons has something to say about it.
A TMZ reporter asked the KISS frontman how he felt about being left off the list, to which he replied, “Well, that’s OK,” joking, “I was thinking of buying Rolling Stone.”
"Well, it's skewed. You have to consider who's popular and who's not,” Simmons elaborated. “But if you really think about it, how good somebody sings may be part and parcel of what they do. For instance, if Jimi Hendrix, who had a long, well, actually, a short career, but he was very famous, would he make it on American Idol? How about Bob Dylan ... And I wrote songs with Bob Dylan; I know the guy. Would he make it on American Idol?”
He also added, "How well you sing is not the most important thing. It's, do you have style? Do you have a fingerprint that says, 'I know that voice immediately'?"
Simmons insists artists shouldn’t really care about the list. “If you've got success, that's enough,” he says. “Accolades and all that, you get that when you do a concert or when fans come up. That's the best thing. To be on a poll by a magazine by people in the backroom, I don't know how much that means."
And Simmons also shared his thoughts on Ozzy Osbourne making the list at #112: “That’s a crime.”