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Should the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame be reserved only for veterans of the rock genre? It’s a stance Gene Simmons holds, and made clear during a recent appearance on the Legends N Leaders podcast. 

“Hip-hop does not belong in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame – nor does opera or symphony orchestras,” he said.

Whether or not the Rock Hall should include artists from a wide range of genres is up for debate – but the fact remains that many non-rock artists, including hip-hop veterans like Public Enemy, Grandmaster Flash and Run-D.M.C., count themselves as inductees.

• READ MORE: “Steve couldn’t utter a word. John stubbed out cigarettes on the back of his hand”: The 1976 gig that “petrified” the Sex Pistols

And in a new interview with TMZ, Public Enemy leader Chuck D refutes the comments of his fellow Rock Hall of Famer Gene Simmons, saying he’s missing the “roll” part of the Hall’s name.

“Everything else other than rock, when rock ‘n’ roll splintered in the ’60s, is the roll,” he explains [via NME]. “Soul music, reggae, hip-hop, which is rap music. Hip-hop is a culture, so it embodies sight, sound, story, and style.”

“But music, the vocal on top of the music, has already been determined. So that’s the roll, that’s flow, that’s the soul in it. Kiss are rock gods, but they don’t have a lot of roll to them.”

Chuck D is thee right person to address Gene Simmons’ tone deaf commentary.

I love how he focuses on the importance of music creation and narratives because it’s not enough to own our stories.

We have to keep telling them too. #BHMpic.twitter.com/qSIqLcxNTZ

— Renee (@PettyLupone) February 13, 2026

Gene Simmons attracted criticism with his initial comments, in which he spoke about hip-hop: “It’s not my music. I don’t come from the ghetto. It doesn’t speak my language.”

In a recent interview with People, the bassist denied that his comments were racially veiled, saying, “I stand by my words,” while adding: “Ghetto is a Jewish term… How could you be, when rock is Black music? It’s just a different Black music than hip-hop, which is also Black music.”

“Rock ‘n’ roll owes everything to Black music,” he concluded, adding: “All the major forms of American music owe their roots to Black music.”

The post “Kiss are rock gods, but they don’t have a lot of roll to them”: Public Enemy leader Chuck D responds to Gene Simmons’ comments that hip-hop doesn’t belong in the Rock Hall appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

When a band’s been in the game long enough, chances are they’ve been through a number of lineup changes to keep the wheels turning. And generally, fans will always hold one lineup in higher stead than others.

The ‘golden era’ of an artist’s career, while sometimes reflective of their period of peak commercial success, is often relative, and is different to different fans depending on when they discovered the artist’s music.

• READ MORE: “Steve couldn’t utter a word. John stubbed out cigarettes on the back of his hand”: The 1976 gig that “petrified” the Sex Pistols

Hard rock outfit Whitesnake were a band with a laundry list of previous members, including Steve Vai, Bernie Marsden, Joel Hoekstra, Doug Aldrich and so many more over the course of their on-and-off 40-year career.

And in a new interview with Chaoszine, Dutch guitarist Adrian Vandenberg reflects on the fanbase’s tendency to have favourites in terms of lineups.

Remembering the band’s Restless Heart tour in 1997, he says: “In certain countries, it went great. South America, man, people went nuts. But in many other countries, they only wanted to hear the 1987 album.

“And England… holy shit, England has always been so split up. You got the guys saying, ‘Micky Moody and Bernie Marsden, that’s the real Whitesnake.’ Then the other guys go, ‘No, no, John Sykes is the shit.’

“It’s like Van Halen, you know? ‘Sammy Hagar is better than David Lee Roth.’ ‘No, Roth is the guy.’ I don’t know why people do that. Come on, man, you like the band, or you don’t, you know? So, the same thing was happening on that tour. People were expecting that big pompous 1987 sound in some countries.”

“We had some surreal experiences in weird cities, man,” he also says. “Great memories, and it was different playing with that lineup. We hit Japan, Europe, South America and Russia, which will probably never happen again the way the world is now. At least not in our lifetime – it’s a strange world we live in right now.”

The post Whitesnake guitarist thinks fans should stop comparing different band lineups: “Come on, man, you like the band, or you don’t!” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

It’s been four long years since the Red Hot Chili Peppers released 2022’s Unlimited Love – but there might be something new on the horizon. In a new interview with MOJO, bassist Flea hints that the band have been cooking up some new tunes.

While this March will see Flea releasing his solo jazz solo debut, Honora, fans have been wondering what that means for the bassist’s main gig with the Chili Peppers. MOJO addresses the elephant in the room, asking whether there’s any plans for a 13th album. “We’ve been writing music together, recording at [guitarist] John Frusciante’s house, and the music feels great,” Flea reveals.

• READ MORE: How to get better recorded guitar sounds at home with mobile absorbers

As Flea puts it, the process has been a bit longer due to the hunt for “magic” in the studio. “Ultimately, once we start playing, it’s about… just catching a magic groove and doing it good,” he adds.

It’s the same approach he has adopted while recording his upcoming jazz record, and one he feels about music on the whole. While it’s an intuitive process working on his solo project, it can be more difficult in a band, due to there being multiple moving cogs in the machine. “It’s like being in a marriage with four people that’s always moving and changing, all these challenges and all the things that you have to deal with,” he explains.

“Egos are inescapable and my ego is as big and as fragile as anybody’s. But it’s always, no matter what, this intrinsic part of who I am and it’s alive and it’s beautiful and you never know what shape it’s going to take next. I really feel like that right now.”

In the past, Flea has made it clear that he never wants to produce rock for rock’s sake. In fact, in 2016 he told SiriusXM’s Pearl Jam Radio that he considered “rock music [to be] a dead form in a lot of ways”, far from its ‘90s heyday of “exciting” releases.

With that in mind, it makes sense that Flea is exploring other avenues of sound – and why the Red Hot Chili Peppers are determined to take their time making their next record, just to ensure their signature blend of funk, rap and rock feel utterly fresh.

Flea’s Honora solo debut will drop on  27 March, and will feature a slew of exciting artists including Thom Yorke and Nick Cave.

The post “We’ve been writing music together, recording at John’s house – it feels great”: Flea hints at new Red Hot Chili Peppers music on the horizon appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

As the legend goes, Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen were like two ships passing in the night. Despite both earning their stripes on the 1970’s Sunset Strip, the pair of iconic guitarists rarely crossed paths. But that didn’t mean they didn’t know about each other.

With Quiet Riot and Van Halen both on the rise, Randy and Eddie became some of the hottest guitarists on the strip. It was impossible not to compare the two – especially when both bands would often play just doors down from each other. “We became well aware of Van Halen,” Quiet Riot’s original bassist Kelly Garni tells the Booked On Rock Podcast [transcribed by Ultimate Guitar]. “Especially when we’d [perform] at the Starwood… we knew they were playing down the street at Gazzarri’s.”

• READ MORE: How to get better recorded guitar sounds at home with mobile absorbers

Garni notes that Van Halen existed in very different circles, frequenting venues that weren’t exactly Quiet Riot’s “type of a club”. However, their differences didn’t mean there was a rivalry between the pair. “There was no competition,” Garni explains. “Most certainly, there was no competition in Randy’s world. Because Randy didn’t compete.”

“It just wasn’t in Randy to try to compete,” he continues. “He couldn’t! The way his brain was wired… he could not form a thought like ‘Oh, I’m gonna be better than that guy!’”

In fact, rather than a rivalry, there was a fascination; Rhoads was curious to see just what Eddie Van Halen had to offer. “He went down to Gazzarri’s because people were talking about this guy,” Garni recalls. “Randy said, ‘I’ll go see what the deal is’… So he went there, he saw him play, and he went, ‘Yeah, OK, the guy’s good.’”

Apparently Rhoads even got himself backstage to meet his supposed ‘rival’. “Randy was trying to get backstage to meet him, and he did get back there…” the bassist says. “But Eddie was acting kind of crazy and bouncing off of walls in his underwear. And Randy was like, ‘Oh okay… not the best time to meet this guy.’”

So, rather than leaving with a burning sense of rivalry, Rhoads only thought: “‘He was really good, but he looked kind of nutty.’”

The pair went on to perform on just one bill together on 23 April 1977 at California’s Glendale Community College. It’s unknown just how many times the pair crossed paths beyond that… but many musicians have claimed that Rhoads and EVH developed more of a ‘rivalry’ in their later years.

Ozzy Osbourne in particular sensed some competition between the pair. The Black Sabbath legend referenced an archival 1982 Guitar Player clip to prove his point, noting how Eddie claimed “everything [Rhoads] did he learned from me”, and later adding “he was good, but I don’t really think he did anything that I haven’t done”.

“I heard recently that Eddie said he taught Randy all his licks … he never,” Osbourne told Rolling Stone in 2022.

Alongside the strange claim, he also claimed that Rhoads “didn’t have a nice thing to say about Eddie”, either. “Maybe they had a falling out or whatever, but they were rivals,” he said.

The archival Eddie clip was also briefly mentioned in a 2022 documentary, Randy Rhoads: Reflection of a Guitar Icon. One of Rhoads’ friends, Kim McNair, explained: “This was the years of guitar heroes. To a large degree, bands were judged on their guitar player. I think all the guitar players in town kept up on each other.”

The post “Eddie was acting crazy and bouncing off of walls in his underwear. Randy was like, ‘Oh okay… not the best time to meet this guy’”: Quiet Riot’s Kelly Garni says Randy Rhoads didn’t have a rivalry with Eddie Van Halen, rather a “fascination” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Unapologetically brash and loaded with attitude, it’s hard to imagine punk’s standard-bearers could suffer pre-performance nerves. But for all their cocksure anti-establishmentism, The Sex Pistols were prone to pre-gig anxiety like anyone else.

As journalist and photographer John Ingham recalls in a new feature in MOJO magazine, there was one gig in particular that struck fear into the hearts of Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock.

• READ MORE: “Mick and Keith operate in a different financial stratosphere”: The stark financial disparity of the Rolling Stones revealed by Ronnie Wood son’s court case

Cast your imagination back to 9 July, 1976; the Pistols are gearing up for a gig at London’s 2,100-capacity Lyceum Theatre, supporting Supercharge and The Pretty Things. As Ingham recalls, this was the first time they’d played in a “big space”, and nerves were high.

“What was really strange was that it seemed such an amazingly unimportant gig,” Ingham says. “And they were so absolutely petrified before, backstage. Steve couldn’t talk, he couldn’t utter a word, he had the look of death on his face. To them, it was extremely important. It was the first time they’d played in a big space.

“John was really nervous. I found that strange. It hadn’t occurred to me that they wanted to win people over. That was the night that John stubbed out cigarettes on the back of his hand while he was singing. It frightened me.”

But the four-piece ultimately rose to the occasion: “Up until this point, they were getting better at it, but it was still the same kind of noise…” Ingham continues. “Suddenly there was this major step up in musical ability. Glen was phenomenal, the bass playing was tremendous. Paul was right on the beat. In one night, suddenly they were all just there.”

The Sex Pistols are still active, with a number of shows planned for 2026. However, John Lydon is no longer in the fold (Frank Carter now holds frontman duties), and has documented his somewhat fractured relations with his former bandmates in recent years.

“Come on Mr. Carter, you’re not Johnny Rotten, I am,” he told Frank as the band approached their reunion tour last year, previously saying in reference to his former bandmates: “I am the Pistols, and they’re not.”

More recently, guitarist Steve Jones said he has “nothing but love” for Lydon, saying he’ll “never shut the door” on a reunion, but asserting that he didn’t think “John would have the energy like Frank does”.

The post “Steve couldn’t utter a word. John stubbed out cigarettes on the back of his hand”: The 1976 gig that “petrified” the Sex Pistols appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

In Converge’s world, things don’t happen by accident – if they say something, they mean it. So, when vocalist Jacob Bannon ushered in the metalcore pioneers’ new record Love is Not Enough by observing that “realism is missing from a lot of modern music”, you knew they planned on doing something about it. “People, especially young people, crave authenticity,” guitarist Kurt Ballou expounds. “The process of recording metal music has been more akin to data entry than playing instruments for quite a long time now – there’s a whole generation who have been raised with this sort of ‘perfect’ music.”

• READ MORE: How Angel Du$t became the most unconventional band in hardcore

Love is Not Enough is not that. It’s a hulking, febrile thing, alive in all its grit and human imperfections. It is Converge at their most Converge – a band reflecting upon the artistic choices and creative bonds that have underpinned a genre-shaping 35 year run. There are solos on the title track with the head-spinning ferocity of Axe to Fall’s all-timer of an opener Dark Horse, for example, while To Feel Something finds Ballou reinterpreting stabbing, lurching Jane Doe-era carnage from the perspective of someone who’s learned to control the violence at their fingertips. Following on from 2021’s Bloodmoon: I, a collaboration with modern goth icon Chelsea Wolfe, Ben Chisholm, and Cave In’s Stephen Brodsky, it is about uncovering fresh ore in old hills.

“There are songs on Bloodmoon that I barely played guitar on,” Ballou says. “Making Love is Not Enough, that goes back to regular Converge, where we are much more comfortable in our roles. The division of labour is well established in the band and it’s back to being focused on our own stuff. But, also, there’s less space to hide. The guitar ideas are mine, and I’m playing them all. There’s a deliberate lack of collaboration on it. Guitar solos are not my thing, but we’re not having guest musicians here. No one’s playing this solo for me, so I gotta fucking do it. So, you know, I did it.”

Caving In

Recorded at Ballou’s God City facility in Salem, Massachusetts, the album is chiefly a document of a band capable of caving your head in from 10 paces. Bassist Nate Newton and drummer Ben Koller are a rhythm section with an unparalleled track record of unleashing sense-rearranging barrages, while Ballou and Bannon remain a pugilistic pairing pushing each other to scabrous new heights.

If you A-B the studio version of Love is Not Enough’s closer We Were Never The Same against its staging in Converge’s recent Audiotree session, you get a visceral idea of how close they have come to capturing the real thing. “When it comes to recording hardcore and metal my approach is always, ‘What does it feel like to watch this band live?’” Ballou says. “What does that excitement feel like, and can I try to capture that excitement? That’s my goal.”

Ballou is an interesting case study for this stuff, though, because he’s a working producer as well as a gnarly guitar player in a hardcore band. When he’s collaborating on Nails’ latest voyage into the death metal morass or helping Fleshwater assemble molasses-thick shoegaze-pop, his word isn’t law.

In fact, his views on recording music are malleable and driven by the desire to get at what people really want. “In my job, I interact with younger people who are fascinated with analog equipment – they’re taking pictures of their session with point and shoot film cameras,” he continues. “But I don’t want to be a luddite. I don’t want to be too cool for modern techniques.”

“All that technology exists for a reason,” he continues. “Incredible engineering has been done to create amp sims, drum replacements, audio file warping and tuning, and I do use that stuff sometimes when it’s helpful to present the music in the most flattering way. I’m not opposed to it. But I think that one of the things about technology that is important to keep in mind is exercising some restraint.

One of the things about an older style of recording is not so much that tape sounds better than digital, or tube amps sound better than modellers, it’s more that the process of using analog equipment necessitated a certain type of workflow. It didn’t require restraint when you were limited to 24 tracks. That was just what there was, and you had to make it work. Now, you would have to make a choice to limit yourself.”

Tools Of The Trade

That studio-rooted discipline also has interesting parallels with Ballou’s attitude towards his other-other career with God City Instruments (GCI), a boutique outfit producing guitars, basses, pedals and DIY pedal kits – something that grew out of Ballou’s legendary GCI business card, which took the form of an actual PCB (sans components) for his Brutalist Jr circuit.

“My wife does a lot of the order-fulfillment side of that and I QC guitars,” he says. “We’ll get a shipment every three or four months and I’ll spend a few days with them. The company is still pretty small, but it’s manageable. I’m not really trying to grow it – I don’t really want to lose control of it.”

“To double my sales would require more than double of my effort, you know? I think a lot of bands end up in a similar situation,” he adds. “Converge, for example, we have great people that we work with, our fans are awesome, and we can go and play shows just about anywhere in the world. But to play a venue twice the size is more than twice as expensive. We’d be required to have guitar techs and drum techs and lighting techs. The ticket price gets a lot higher and now we’re not doing things on our own terms.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCI gear forms the backbone of Ballou’s work on Love is Not Enough. Fitted with their overwound Slug Jammer humbuckers, there are multiple Craftsman models in play, along with a 27.5” scale Deconstructivist baritone that was used to bring the muscle on Distract and Divide, To Feel Something and Amon Amok, a trio of Drop A monsters.

“I’ve also got a really good short-scale Tele with Lindy Fralin pickups,” he notes. “I used that for a bunch of the clean, atmospheric background sounds on Amon Amok. On Force Meets Presence I might have used my First Act Sheena. I can’t remember if I actually did this, or if I just was thinking about doing it, but a lot of that song is rooted on the A string, so to make that clean I might have taken the low E off of the guitar for that whole section.”

Spreading The Load

While working on Bloodmoon: I, Ballou had to find his place within a guitar sound that he viewed as vibe-based more than “dense or athletic”. Here, the opposite is largely true. But his amp selection process remained the same, with five or six rigs primed for work as he chased a tone. “I used to have a whole bunch of amps running at the same time, hoping to capture the best of all worlds,” he says. “But I’ve come to realise over time that it just flattens whatever cool character each one has.”

With the rhythm sounds oscillating between an early Sparrows Sons model, employed with a Boss OS-2 to accent its articulate, wide-ranging gain, and a GCI Onslaught-assisted Dean Costello HMW, most of the leads were tracked with a first generation Bad Cat Black Cat, paired again with an OS-2 or a GCI Crimson Cock.

“That’s like an NPN Rangemaster,” Ballou says. “It’s really the best for matching a guitar to an amp. If your guitar feels too bright or too dark, or not loud enough, or too loud, by turning a few knobs on that thing, you can make it work.”

What pass for cleans in Converge’s world, meanwhile, were captured on a Traynor YRM-1 that Ballou picked up for $99 in the mid-1990s. “I can, honestly, probably record anything with that amp,” he observes. “I also have a few JMP 2204s, but one of them is from a transitional year when it started getting a little more JCM900-ish. I want to say I have a ‘76 and a ‘79. They’ve obviously been maintained differently over the years, but the newer one is tighter and the older one is creamier. I like them both a lot – that was set up as a pedal platform as I needed different sounds. If a song needs a fuzz part or an HM-2 part, that amp can do it all.”

Bright Spark

Zooming out, though, something remarkable about the way Love is Not Enough sounds is the warmth and clarity behind its guitars. As a riffer, Ballou is naturally a grimy, aggressive player, meaning that keeping a sense of nuance alive requires deliberate thought. “I’m always pushing the brightness to try to get more clarity,” he says. “But then sometimes you end up with a very chirpy sound, which is not very metal. The OS-2 quells the chirpiness and also starves the bottom end.”

From both a philosophical and practical perspective, Ballou sees his yard as the mid-range. Returning again to the idea of a division of labour, he is happy to leave the sludge to Newton and the splashy stuff to Koller’s cymbals. He’s not trying to grind you to a pulp, he’s trying to punch you in the solar-plexus. “Listen to the classic Slayer records – they don’t have crushing low end or sizzly high end,” he says. “There are great guitar sounds that have that, but we’ve always thought of Converge more as a hard band than a heavy band.”

Converge’s Love Is Not Enough is out February 13 through Deathwish/Epitaph.

The post Why metalcore pioneers Converge have returned to bring an end to “data entry” modern metal and show a new generation the power of authenticity appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.