Nerding Day: Gene Simmons' Firestarter Cover

The United Kingdom is currently speedrunning national decline, obsessing over internet activity, immigration, and public bathroom usage while its decrepit, aging population hollers terrified hate-jabberings out their windows like Bloodborne NPCs. But despite their current laser focus on hitting themselves and their many, many crimes, the British did bequeath the world some truly great things — it's not all spotted dicks and Benedicts Cumberbatch. Christopher Lee. Sharp cheddar cheese. Big beat music.

We all know the Big Beat Manifesto. Children recite it each morning in school while standing reverently at attention and saluting a flag emblazoned with Fatboy Slim's face. Say it with me, now:

Out of the big beat movement came The Prodigy, not to be confused with the American rapper or internet service provider of the same name. The group pumped out hits like the controversial "Smack My Bitch Up" and the found-on-the-Canadian-compilation-record-Big Shiny Tunes 2 "Breathe."

Brief aside: the tracklist of Big Shiny Tunes 2, a product of Canada's MTV expy, MuchMusic, is a real land of contrasts to look back on today. First, you've got songs that absolutely define popular music in 1997: Blur's "Song 2," Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life," Smash Mouth's "Walking On the Sun." And then, as a result of the Canadian content laws, you have acts like Bran Van 3000, The Tea Party, and Wide Mouth Mason, none of whom ever received airplay south of the border. If you're an American and you think you heard a Tea Party song on the radio one time, no you didn't. That was Pearl Jam.

Anyway, The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers both showed up on this disc. 1997 was big beat's year. "Breathe" was fresh off The Prodigy's The Fat of the Land, the cover of which you almost certainly recognize even if you've never knowingly listened to them.

That album also featured "Firestarter," which readers under 35 will have briefly heard in the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 scene where Jim Carrey's handsome assistant shaves him bald. It's a fun track, sampling Kim Deal's guitar off The Breeders' "Cannonball" and featuring ridiculous, self-aware lyrics about being a little arsonist gremlin written and performed by Keith Flint. Because flint starts fires! Cute!

Flint used the track as a way to get promoted to vocalist from his previous position, "guy who dances onstage at The Prodigy shows." He was also a total maniac in the best possible way — a BJJ-practicing, motorcycle racing birdwatcher who had to be restrained on long haul flights like a white, bird-obsessed Mr. T.

Pretty much everyone agreed that "Firestarter" was good. And thus, as it is with every good thing, people wanted to call it theirs. The covers started rolling in. Jimmy Eat World did a dramatic, low-tempo version in 2001 that feels like a morally neutral version of that trend from the late 2000s when white people played rap songs on the acoustic guitar and people thought that was really great and funny for some reason. Weird Al did a mere thirty-second parody — not his best work — on his TV show because CBS didn't want to pay royalties to use the full track.

And then, in 2004, an ancient evil stirred from its slumber.

Today, Gene Simmons is best known as the star of a reality show that blatantly ripped off The Osbournes and as a character in a first-person shooter for the Dreamcast. But what you might not know is that he was also a musician!

KISS was a "rock band" — we don't have those anymore but imagine if contemporary country music was played on an electric guitar, then replace all instances of "hometown," "truck," and "America" in the lyrics with "speedboat," "rock", and "sex partytown" and you're most of the way there. KISS is one of the best-selling bands of all time, which proves that anything is possible in America if you know a guy who you can bully into wearing kitty cat facepaint.

Gene Simmons played bass and sang in KISS. He wore demon facepaint and had a long tongue. It was fine. I guess it freaked out a few squares, but then, the squares were a lot easier to freak out back then. In 1978, Gene released a self-titled solo album. Then, in 2004, he put out his second record. It's called Asshole. Here's the cover.

Yeah, it was a different time. But even in 2004 basically everybody hated this. Gene Simmons had the kind of industry clout where he could get Bob Fucking Dylan to cowrite a track with him and he used it to produce an embarrassing record that critics and audiences agreed was for the birds, if you were the kind of person who wanted to torture birds for some reason.

Gene's so trying for edgy, trying to own a kind of villain status, but he's one American flag tie away from looking like disgraced arcade lunatic Billy Mitchell.

He didn't even put the naughty word on the cover. Hell, Denis Leary beat him to the bit by over a decade! But surely, veteran shock rocker Gene Simmons brought out the big guns for the title track itself.

…this is nothing. This is less hurtful than anything I've ever heard an eight-year-old say in Fortnite. This is the third-meanest song in a Disney Channel TV movie about middle school girls whose lives are forever changed through their friendship with a magical talking tampon.

"Asshole" didn't get a video. You know what did? Gene Simmons' cover of "Firestarter." Did this recording need to exist? No. Is it the worst thing I've ever heard? Also no. It's pretty terrible, but if a Jigsaw type put a gun to my head and told me I had to listen to this or Jimmy Eat World's cover on a loop for twenty-four hours to appreciate my normal, non-Firestarter-listening life, I might actually pick Gene. It's got Dave Navarro on guitar, so that's… something?

Really, it's not the song itself that's at issue. It's the video. Gene took things in a decidedly different direction from The Prodigy.

As Dave hits that opening lick, we first see Gene through a fisheye lens, sporting a fedora and throwing the devil horns down at the floor. Women look on from a staircase above him as he and the camera rotate nauseatingly. Quick cut to black, then we fade in on a pan across more women gyrating. Through the forest of on-trend early 2000s exposed midriffs, we can make out what appears to be a car.

Cut again. It is a car. But not just any car.

It's a bouncing lowrider! Hell yes. It even has flames on the side! You know, because he's the firestarter. Like the title of the song, which is absolutely not "I'm the firestarter".

Here I have to point out that as far as I can tell, there is no high-definition version of this video available anywhere. It's possible that one doesn't actually exist. Or maybe Gene's just mercilessly scythed down any uploads of this thing that dare to rise above 480p. By the way, we are ten seconds into the video.

This part is a little hard to explain. Gene reaches down towards the camera, and I can't tell if he's holding a lighter or if in the worldbuilding of this video, he's able to perform a flaming Shoryuken. Either way, he starts a fire (get it?) which spreads outside the boundaries of the scene and makes the whole thing look like the coolest Tripod website on the internet of 1998.

He beckons to the viewer, as if initiating them into a great secret. Then he steps to the side, and that secret is revealed.

It's more scantily clad 2000s skinny girls humping adjacent to a bouncing low rider. What, did you think there was going to be something else to this? Well, there kind of is. There's Gene Simmons going fucking mental in white contact lenses.

This already seems like a mean-spirited parody of Y2K pop culture, and it's about to get worse. Guess what the car's license plate is. "DEMON?" "FRSTRTR?"

It's "ORIGINAL G", because "Gene," but also because it was the 2000s and hip hop culture had just made its way into the suburbs, defining "cool" for a generation of young, white American men and, apparently, at least one 54-year-old one. This is when I realized: he's trying to make a rap video while talk-singing through a cover of a British electronic track. He even throws a wad of cash at the camera!

And if you somehow believe that Gene's bitches were able to get through the filming of this thing humping solely against his sweet, fiery ride and one another's slim, greased-up bodies, let me disabuse you of that notion.

We're forty seconds in. Costume change! The girls trade in their Daisy Dukes and impractically cropped tees for red bikinis. Gene dons a classic white pimp coat. It's middle-aged rockstar Christmas!

He's gone full pimp! He has a pimp cup!

One thing I haven't gotten across so far is how aggressive the women's dancing is throughout this video. Sure, there's a couple of shots where they're just writhing in slow motion. But for the most part, they're doing these really rapid, jerky, brutal moves.

It looks like a silver medal-winning routine in Synchronized Sex Murder at the Evil Olympics. Maybe a little too assertive and frightening for the target audience. Can we get some male gazey implied female homoeroticism? And can we turn up the lens flares a little, fellas? I was able to actually see the performers and sets in the last shot.

Wonderful.

At this point it strikes me how at odds this video is with the track. The original was a stripped-down, tongue-in-cheek performance of angry, disaffected masculinity. Gene's rendition is about how cool it is to be a wealthy, affected guy who definitely dyes his grays but like, nobody can tell. It's the self-aggrandizing attempt of an aging white man to show that he's still with it, that he can still party with the best of them, that he's not just "dad music." The kids today like pimps, right? And Christ allegories?

And, uh, titillating lesbianism again?

Now, I'm going pretty hard on Gene here, but there's one more-or-less incontestable fact about the man that you might not be aware of. Gene Simmons fucked. A lot. He fucked Cher! Cher! The star of Moonstruck, The Witches of Eastwick, and Mermaids, and one of the greatest EGO_ winners to ever walk the earth. She'll get that Tony one day.

And even if Gene's claimed total of over 5,000 sexual partners is a gross exaggeration, he was in a massively popular rock band in an era when the prospect of fucking your fans was commonly understood as one of the main reasons you'd join a rock band in the first place. Plus he was kind of handsome out of the makeup, in that "70s guy sort of ugly" way. It's safe to say that he threw the average way off for everybody who wasn't named Wilt Chamberlain or Sex Georg.

But if you saw the "Firestarter" video without knowing that Gene Simmons had rampaged dickfirst through an entire small town's worth of young, impressionable women in the decades prior to filming it, you would not imagine that this was a man who fucked, had fucked, or would ever fuck.

He looks like a child who made a wish to be a rock star with an ironic genie and was instantly transported into the failing body of a bassist long past the heyday of his cultural relevance. He looks like the first man to literally drown in pussy. He looks like an Eric Andre character named Gonorrhea Fartz.

Again, I need to stress that this video is not a grim indictment of the way we lived twenty years ago. This isn't a case of wrongly applying today's moral and aesthetic standards to the past. Like H.P. Lovecraft's racism, plenty of people thought this shit was awful back when it came out. And so, the sets and costumes were burned. The women were sworn to never speak of it again. And Gene Simmons never released another solo record.

These days, he's mostly charging fans to be his personal assistant, opposing boycotts of Israel, and complaining about how there's like, no Beatles anymore. And sure, all that stuff is bad and/or annoying. But is it as bad as the video for "Firestarter"? I don't know. I'm just asking questions. Do your own research, and come to your own conclusions.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, who didn't start the fire. It was always burning since Gene's own video confession, your honor!

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM