As a followup to yesterday’s KISS post a reader emailed me to suggest some makeup brands that KISS shouldn’t endorse. Of course, the band did do their own makeup product, back in 1978.

It’s not until you look back to their heyday that you really realize how far the brand has collapsed. While it’s still a goofy commercialization of a rock band, the KISS Your Face Makeup Kit enables us to imitate the band’s look, while the ad also shows kids miming to KISS songs with tennis rackets. The ad and the product tell a story that is authentic to how people were experiencing the brand. Skip to 2009 and you have to ask just what relevance (or resonance) does KISS as M&Ms have?

Steve Portigal (center) and friends miming to KISS songs with badminton rackets, Burlington, ON, 1978 (without the use of KISS Your Face Makeup Kit)

Happy Holidays by Billy Idol is Yet Another Moment where parody withers under the steely glare of reality. I mean, wasn’t this a sketch on SNL Saturday Night Live in the 80s? It should have been.

Rock is dead they say

If you want rock and roll all night, KISS Coffeehouse will be the place to be. On Tuesday, June 27th, legendary KISS band members Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons will be on hand at Myrtle Beach South Carolina’s Broadway at the Beach to cut the ribbon on the most outrageous coffee and dessert shop ever constructed.

One of the sublime pleasures in being a longtime fan of the Simpsons is that once in a while things happen that seem as if they are torn from the script pages of a recent episode. I suppose the corpse of rock-n-roll has already been flogged, flayed, broasted, turned into a B-way musical, re-released, remastered, repackaged, revised, endorsed, divorced, sold-out, infotained, bleeped and crammed into its Kiss Koffin where it revolves at a dramatic thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute, but damn, this is sweet and bitter (like the coffee and desserts, no doubt).

Check out their menu:
Rockiato (size: Gold, Platinum)
Rockuccino
Cinnamon Rollover
White Choc. Symphony
British Toffee Invasion
Rocket Ride Espresso (sizes: Single, Deuce, Destroyer)
Firehouse S’Mores
Kiss Kooler
also, Cotton Candy, Strawberry Shortcake, and Assorted Cakes, Pies & Sweets (as priced).

Is this what former Flintstones writers are doing nowadays? Frozen Rockuccino! Yikes.

[And is that even the correct KISS lyric they are referencing in their press release? Didn’t they want to rock and roll all nite?]