Yesterday (8/26/25), KISS frontman Paul Stanley, tweeted the following on his X account:
“THE BIGGEST KISS SONG OF ALL TIME IS… I Was Made for Lovin’ You with 1.3 BILLION total streams on Spotify as of late August and approximately 850 THOUSAND daily streams!! Amazing and THANK YOU!”
According to blabbermouth.net, although I Was Made For Lovin’ You was a huge chart success for KISS 40 years ago, it was maligned by many of the group’s fans who didn’t appreciate the track’s disco beat…
…In 2018, [KISS bassist/vocalist Gene] Simmons said that he hated performing I Was Made For Lovin’ You because he is forced to sing like his grandmother. Asked in an interview with OK! magazine to name a song that he wasn’t initially crazy about that ended up becoming a hit, Simmons said,”…’ I hate playing that song to [this] day. Stadiums full of people jump up and down like biblical locusts — they go nuts — with tattoos and grills on… ‘Ahhhh!’ They’re all jumping up and down, and I’m going, ‘Do, do, do, do, do, do… Kill me now.’ Still — still to this day I hate that song.”
After the female interviewer pressed him on whether the song ever grew on him after performing it for the last four decades, he said, “Well, how about you sing that song? You’re a girl. I wanna sing guy stuff.”
Stanley reportedly stated back in 2017 that the song’s success was, “a double-edged sword, because it became such a massive hit but it was also so contrary and contradictory to what we had done before.” He added: “The funniest thing is when we do festivals sometimes in Europe where it’s very much… the bands are quite heavy, well, when we do an encore of I Was Made For Lovin’ You, you suddenly have all these people with spikes in their eyeballs or bones through their noses singing along. So it’s a song that seems to transcend everything — although it went through a period, certainly, of a big backlash against it.”
15 Responses
I have the 12″ Disco mix single. Its more Disco-ey than the original album version. Its a good song yet not particularly a good Kiss song per se. I am a Kiss outlier fan. I enjoy thier stuff like the solo records, this song, the entire Unmasked album as well. I never owned Destroyer, Alive or thier first record. Never will
Clearly it was written for the Studio 54 crowd. But at the time, I would imagine, most die hard KISS fans, viewed it with scorn and disgust, referring to the band as “sell outs.”
It’s amazing, that all these decades later, despite it being reviled, it turned out to be the band’s most successful hit.
I always viewed the “Dynasty” album as a “disco album” up until a few years ago. My bro, Doug R., commented to me that only two songs are disco inspired songs….”I Was Made for Loving You” and “Sure Know Something”, and the rest is a classic KI$$ rock album. After reflecting on his comment, I realized he was correct! And I think it’s a great album!
But IMO, “Rock and Roll all Nite” is KI$$’ “biggest song of all time”…I don’t care how much it has been streamed.
How could Gene Simmons hate that song??? I’m sure it made his wallet fatter…..I read somewhere that Simmons didn’t play bass on that song. Rather, it was Paul Stanley.
I was so into Kiss when they released Dynasty. I remember the only magazine that still consistently covered them at that point was 16, but what’s funny is those were the same people who ran Creem (bet you didn’t know that). So they were talking about the record before it came out, and said it was the tightest, hottest record they ever made (and I tend to agree; they made a Classic Rock record and did a pretty darn good job of it), but there could be some DISCO KISS??? so I read that and was horrified. A radio station previewed the song before the record came out, and my friend recorded it off the radio, and the core group of Kiss fans (so three or four of us) went to his house to hear it. And, none of us said anything. I really liked Ace’s guitar solo, (still think it’s one of the most musically cool things Kiss ever did: a sample before actual sampling: taking a solo straight off of the Alive! record and dropping it in this disco part but he played it). Then my friend finally goes, “I like it..” lol….i.e., we had to convince ourselves to like it because it was Kiss. it was just another disco song with some guitars on it; nothing revolutionary. They put the guitars on there just to make it more like Kiss, they weren’t trying to break new ground or invent a new sound. To hear Desmond Child go on about that is funny, and besides, Rod Stewart already did that a year before, and didn’t the Stones?
It’s a lot better live, and they should’ve opened their Dynasty tour with it and then go into King of the Nighttime World, and only should’ve played New York Groove from the solo records because it was the only hit out of all four of those solo albums. But Dynasty is one of their best studio records, and it’s more like Destroyer, but even more serious in places. All four of them put their best performances on it vocally, playing wise. Peter’s song is one of his best songs, and I can tell it was Gene who really worked that up, and he did a great job on it, it’s just too bad Peter’s not on it more, but Anton is one of the only drummers out there that can swing like he does.
Perhaps a future question of the week could be as follows:
Did you ever use song lyrics to try to pick someone up romantically? If so, what song and did it work? LOL
Okay, I ask that on Monday. I will make note of it, that is a quite an amusing question.