Kiss: Deuce

Continuing my list of the Top 20 albums of 1974, coming in at #1 is Kiss by Kiss. I will gladly admit that this is not the best album of 1974. It is not even an album that most would put in the Top 20, much less at #1. My selections at #2 (Joni Mitchell), #3 (Van Morrison), and #5 (Jackson Browne) are all better rock/pop albums by almost any standard used to rate a record. As I said a couple of days ago, I had the Van Morrison album at #1 on this list for decades. However, as I have gotten older I have realized that a Top 20 list should be much more personal than most critics allow. Some would consider an album like Kiss’ 1974 debut as a guilty pleasure. Here in the Faux Household, thanks to the open-mindedness championed by Ms. Faux, there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. If you like something, whether it be music, art, film, food, literature, etc., it does not matter what others think about that thing. As long as no one is harmed, you should embrace your opinion and stand by it no matter what others think, and you should allow others to do the same. There is no better example of this concept in my life than this record. Kiss was the first album I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember going into the small record section in the electronics department of our local Sears and grabbing the album off the rack. I had learned about Kiss from my best friend and his older sister. I am pretty sure that the band had just released Kiss Alive, so I was seven years old. I had no idea what the hell was going on musically or visually with the band. I had been raised on AM radio, ’50s rock and roll, and Broadway musicals, so the music of Kiss might as well have been shipped down to Earth from another solar system. Obviously, Kiss were not re-inventing music with their debut, but when I look back now I can see that it holds up as a great hard rock debut. Since buying my first album, I have learned about thousands of albums that are of a higher quality, but Kiss has never left my rotation. I have probably listened to it at least once every year since I bought it. While other albums may come and go after a period of time, Kiss is on a short list of albums that I will never stop loving and listening to.

To learn more about Kiss, check out their website.

To check out all of the old Faux Show Best of the Year Shows, visit The Year In Review Series page.

To listen to all of the songs of the day, check out the Radio Faux Show Song of the Day playlist.

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