Be serious, don't be like Black Metal sucks or Death Metal sucks.
Yes they are metal/hard rock. Along with Poison, Motley Crew, Ozzy Ozbourne, Bon Jovi, Quiet Riot, AC/DC, Warrant, Whitesnake, Twisted Sister, Van Halen, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Ratt, Scorpions, etc etc etc. I actually wonder about White Zombie. Everyone classifies them as metal, but to me they don't sound anything like the heavy metal that I know (which granted, is not saying much as I don't listen to metal, but I've heard enough of it from other people to know what it sounds like).
No. They're just Pop Rock. I like them though. The costumes were sort of Heavy Metal though.
KISS is a hard rock band, plain and simple. Bands like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Dio, Judas Priest, Mot?rhead, and Ozzy Osbourne are heavy metal.
Kinda depends on how broadly you define metal. In terms of the 70's acts that were around when KISS formed up - i.e. Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Rainbow, etc. - absolutely not. KISS was a mainstream rock band with a heavy dose of shlocky corporate marketing cliches (comic books used to sell KISS power pendants, and the band made a horrible tv movie called KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park). By the emerging standards of early-mid 80's glam/hair metal bands - basically, yeah. The make up and spandex look became very much a part of that scene (though the make up was more let's make the guys look androgynous, than KISS facepaint, which KISS actually dumped in the 80s). And the poppier, less edgy sound of pop-metal bands like Motley Crue and the like was closer to KISS than the metal bands of a generation before. By the heavy standards of later acts like Pantera, or even early GnR, not a chance. * Overall, I'd say KISS is just basically an American rock band of medium hardness. Some really good rock tunes, but a little too corporate rock to really be metal.
By today's standards, absolutely not. However, you have to consider the time at which they peaked in popularity. What constituted heavy metal back then is radically different from the criteria we have today.
