Gene Simmons vs. Anonymous: Who's the bigger tool?

KISS bassist Gene Simmons—a man willing to parade around stages dressed up like "The Demon" while singing songs about sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll—isn't a man best known for the subtlety (or consistency) of his thought. In a 2007 interview, while explaining why file-sharing had killed music, Simmons said he wasn't going back into the studio because no one would pay for the tunes he creates. His very next sentence: "I will be putting out a Gene Simmons box set called Monster—a collection of 150 unreleased songs. KISS will have another box set of unreleased music in the next year."

But threatening the Internet vigilantes of Anonymous with prison rape might be a new low, even for Simmons. Unless, of course, Simmons' true genius is simply calling attention to himself; in that case, he succeeded again spectacularly this weekend. Anonymous repaid his comments with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that has taken Simmons' website offline.

Spectator sport

It's hard to know who's the bigger asshat here. On the one hand, Anonymous has spent the last few weeks cyber-attacking everyone from the RIAA to the law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver to the UK government's Intellectual Property Office. The group's manifesto—"For this, you will be held accountable before the people, and you will be punished by them. We will not stop. We will not forget. We will prevail. We are anonymous"—could serve as the dictionary definition of "puerile." Leaders have said they will continue until they stop "being angry" as they try to change the world "OUTSIDE the basement."

And yet—they're going after Gene Simmons. Gene Simmons. This is the guy who told Billboard in 2007 that "every little college kid, every freshly scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning. Those kids are putting 100,000 to a million people out of work. How can you pick on them? They've got freckles. That's a crook. He may as well be wearing a bandit's mask."

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