- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Most heavy metal bands take their music really seriously, but some like Twisted Sister are more light-hearted about it.
Twisted Sister – Stay Hungry (1984): Most heavy metal bands take their music really seriously, but some like Twisted Sister are more light-hearted about it. Bandleader and songwriter Dee Snider has long, frizzy hair and wears heavy makeup in public appearances that approaches war paint. Stay Hungry is the band’s third and most successful album. Twisted Sister came up with a clever music video for their song “We’re Not Gonna Take It” having an Animal House theme and a lot of slapstick humor. One of the stars of National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), Mark Metcalf reprises his role as the sadistic ROTC officer Douglas C. Neidermeyer in the video. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” became a major MTV hit, and the video was in heavy rotation for months, with the song reaching #21 on the Billboard singles chart.
A second music video in the same vein was produced for “I Wanna Rock” that features Mark Metcalf as well as another star from Animal House, Stephen Furst, who plays Kent “Flounder” Dorfman in the film. “I Wanna Rock” reached #68 on the charts. Also, Twisted Sister has a cameo appearance in the surreal comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), where Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) walks through an outdoor set where the band is making a fictional video for a third song on Stay Hungry, “Burn in Hell”. Twisted Sister made the most of their fame by touring throughout the country and around the world in 1984 and 1985; their opening act was future superstars Metallica. By the summer of 1985, Stay Hungry had sold two million copies, and sales eventually totaled three million. While Twisted Sister never had another hit album or single, they parlayed their mid-1980’s mainstream success into a 40-year career consisting of 7 studio albums – including A Twisted Christmas (2006) – 9 live albums, and 5 retrospective albums, culminating in a farewell tour in 2015–2016 that they called Forty and F—k It. In 2004, Twisted Sister released a re-recorded version of Stay Hungry, called Still Hungry with seven bonus tracks. The Twisted Sister videos show parents and teachers getting the worst of the band’s mischief; and, because of its “violence”, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” made the so-called “Filthy Fifteen” list promulgated by the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) that I remember being populated mainly by Senators’ wives, with all of them being Republican save the most prominent member, Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator and future Vice President Al Gore. The group was concerned about the effects of rock music lyrics on impressionable children, and that led to Senate hearings and notorious “Parental Advisory / Explicit Lyrics” stickers that appear on many records to this day, beginning in the 1980’s. The controversy had the predictable result of both encouraging sales of supposedly offensive music while simultaneously making a lot of albums difficult to find – Walmart for one refused to sell any CD’s with a Parental Advisory sticker. From a June 2016 Under Appreciated Rock post on Facebook about the PMRC: “I had intended to go down the Filthy Fifteen list, one by one; since the point of the post is to examine the outrageous and often offensive lyrics that rock music has created over the years, beyond those that I talked about in earlier posts. Frankly, the Filthy Fifteen is under-whelming in this regard and doesn’t deserve that much attention. Only a third of the songs on this list are hits, and only the Twisted Sister number is really a signature song. Most of the Filthy Fifteen are deep album cuts that, even at the time, were likely unfamiliar to many of the fans of these bands and artists. With the single exception of “She Bop” by Cyndi Lauper, the biggest surprise though is how unimaginative and pedestrian the Filthy Fifteen list is. The fact that 9 of the 15 songs on the list – and 4 of the 5 hits – are there due to ’sex’ raised my eyebrows at least. The number of double entendres about sex in rock music over the decades has to run into the hundreds by now – “rock and roll” itself was originally a slang term for making love – and that is pretty much all that is going on here. After all, these musicians are trying to write songs that might get played on the radio, and being truly explicit doesn’t work. The list is laden with heavy-metal bands as might be expected, but the best they could do with Black Sabbath – whose very name promises lurid occult references – is a song about getting drunk? Really? Why “We’re Not Gonna Take It” showed up at all among the Filthy Fifteen is a real puzzler, but it brought out the ire of Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider, who provided the most memorable testimony at the U. S. Senate hearing that he made even more effective by dressing up for the occasion. The other two musicians who testified are Frank Zappa – at least one of the F15 alumni praised him as running interference for the whole rock industry – and John Denver. This wide-ranging trio gives some indication as to how offended rock musicians were in turn about the whole offending-lyrics business. As quoted in a 2015 post by Nick Gillespie on the libertarian website reason.com, Dee Snider told the U. S. Senate: ‘You will note from the lyrics before you that there is absolutely no violence of any type either sung about or implied anywhere in the song. Now, it strikes me that the PMRC may have confused our video presentation for this song . . . with the lyrics, with the meaning of the lyrics. It is no secret that the videos often depict story lines completely unrelated to the lyrics of the song they accompany. The video “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was simply meant to be a cartoon with human actors playing variations on the Road Runner – Wile E. Coyote theme. Each stunt was selected from my extensive personal collection of cartoons.’ A somewhat tongue-in-cheek TV movie about the PMRC controversy called Warning: Parental Advisory came out in 2002; it was created by VH1 and was directed by Mark Waters. In one scene, appearing as himself, Dee Snider clomps into the Senate chambers in full Twisted Sister regalia to testify.”