Huh?
There has been talk on this thread referencing authors and rock critics that Gene Simmons might have read when he was in high school, and talk about many bands from the late 60's and early 1970's.
I'm gonna guess you did not read the thread.
[Ah, you edited the above while I wrote this. Oh, well. It didn't change the meaning.]
Oh, I've read it all. My comment should be read much more broadly than one band, one song. It's illustrating the way we as a society (or community or whatever we are) force people into pigeonholes. For Kiss the song
Beth was a disaster. Their fans hated it with special venom because it nohow fit into the hard rocking style they expected and demanded of Kiss.
Few musicians embrace the labels we insist on applying to them, LZ being a case in point. Their musical
oeuvre was multi-genre, particularly from their third album. In the sixties when they started there was no such thing as "heavy metal" outside chemistry and a couple pun-ish wordplay references by Burroughs. LZ had stacks of big amps so when the label arose in the seventies (in whatever magazine devised it) the label was applied to them despite being a poor fit. You've got to call them something, don't you? With time passing, other bands got "heavier," Sabbath and Priest among others, and LZ was left behind, no longer heavy enough to be "metal." Oh, boo-hoo.
How, then, do we force them into a pigeonhole? How about not at all? I don't kid myself. I'm old enough and experienced enough to know that we will always label other people and get our collective feathers ruffled when our labels are questioned. That ruffling is aptly illustrated by this thread having reached twenty pages.
