Kiss - Hide your Heart (Video 1989)

What this video is

Released in 1989 as the lead single from Kiss's fifteenth studio album Hot in the Shade, 'Hide Your Heart' arrived during the final years of the unmasked Kiss era, with the band having removed their iconic makeup in 1983. The video's opening gang-violence title card — citing 80,000 gang members and 600 gang-related deaths in New York and LA — anchors it in the late-1980s urban anxiety of the crack epidemic and…

Why it matters

A key artifact of late-era 1980s arena hard rock's MTV video strategy, 'Hide Your Heart' represents Kiss's most socially engaged music video of the decade — unusual for the genre — by embedding a gang-narrative morality tale within standard rock performance framing. Directed by Marty Callner, the…

The director

Martin Henry Callner (August 25, 1946 – March 17, 2025) was a Chicago-born, Cincinnati-raised American director. He began his career in television news at WCPO-TV in 1969, later directing HBO comedy specials from 1975 onward. He founded Cream Cheese…