Line #31 Music/TwistedSister


1	[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/twisted-sister-christmas.jpg]]
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3	->''I Wanna Rock! '''(ROCK!)'''''
4
5	Twisted Sister was an American HeavyMetal band from UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity. Their work fused the shock tactics of Music/AliceCooper, the rebellious mood of the NewWaveOfBritishHeavyMetal, and the extravagant image of glam rock bands such as the Music/NewYorkDolls and Music/{{KISS}}, notably the makeup. Musically, the band implemented elements of traditional heavy metal bands such as Music/JudasPriest, along with a style that was similar to early glam metal bands. The band was generally categorized as glam metal for their earlier work, although the band did not consider themselves to be so.
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7	Although the band was formed by guitarist Jay Jay French in December 1972, all of their songs were written by Dee Snider from 1976 onward. Twisted Sister's most well-known hits included "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock", both popularized by regular airplay on Creator/{{MTV}} in the 1980s. Many of the band's songs explored themes of parent vs. child conflicts and criticisms of the educational system.
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9	''A Twisted Christmas'' was a Christmas album from Twisted Sister, released on October 17, 2006. The genesis of this album was the group was looking for something new to do. One of them mentioned an idea for a Christmas album. Dee Snider said that he made "We're Not Gonna Take It" melody taken from "Come All Ye Faithful". Thus was born the idea of making metal versions of Christmas songs. Originally this album was going to be Twisted Sister's swan song but it was unexpectedly popular with fans and critics.
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11	Drummer A.J. Pero passed away in his sleep on March 20, 2015 while on tour with Adrenaline Mob and the band stated they would not continue on without him. [[Music/DreamTheater Mike Portnoy]], previously of both bands, stood in for Pero during their farewell shows in 2015 and 2016. The band played their last ever concert on November 12, 2016.
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13	After the band split up, the various surviving members went on to other projects. Dee Snider has continued as a solo artist and has released three albums since. French retired from music, giving away all his guitars to the band's road crew after the final concert and now works as a writer and motivational speaker. Ojeda has his own hot sauce brand. Mendoza now works in multimedia and broadcasting production.
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15	!!Twisted Sister videos include:
16	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xmckWVPRaI "We're Not Gonna Take It"]]
17	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmEfFlbqbbY "Come All Ye Faithful"]]
18	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRwrg0db_zY "I Wanna Rock"]]
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20	!!!Discography
21	* ''Under the Blade'' (1982)
22	* ''You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll'' (1983)
23	* ''Stay Hungry'' (1984)
24	* ''Come Out and Play'' (1985)
25	* ''Love Is for Suckers'' (1987)
26	* ''Still Hungry'' (2004)
27	* ''A Twisted Christmas'' (2006)
28	----
29	!!Twisted Sister provided examples of:
30	* TheEighties: While they started the previous decade, they really blew up in the 1980s.
31	* EightiesHair: One of the most blatant examples, which they kept alive into the 21st century.
32	* ActorAllusion: The "I Wanna Rock" video also features a cameo by Creator/StephenFurst as [[Film/AnimalHouse Kent "Flounder" Dorfman]], who finally gets to spray Neidermeyer's expy with a water spritzer.
33	* AfraidOfDoctors: "Under the Blade", which Snider wrote, was inspired by Eddie Ojeda's throat surgery.
34	%%* AnimatedMusicVideo
35	* AntiLoveSong: "Love Is For Suckers", which is a rant about men who are total suckers that would do anything for love... even the singer during the breakdown, when he tries to resist Little Miss Perfect's attempt to get back together with him and ends up falling for it when he says, "You what? You will? With your heels on?"
36	* AsHimself: Dee Snider had a guest appearance as himself in an episode of ''Series/CobraKai'', as well as a contestant on ''Series/TheMaskedSinger''.
37	* BerserkButton: Snider hated being associated with pop-metal, or at the very least, had very little respect for the subgenre at large, which he very notably nicknamed "happy metal". He was especially irritated by its growing tendency towards acoustic power ballads in the 1990s.
38	** In fact, he classified his band under the genre name "hid-metal", coined by Snider himself ("hid" standing for ''hideous'', as opposed to glam).
39	* CarefulWithThatAxe: ''"You can't escape from the bed you've made; when your time has come, you'll accept the..... '''BBBLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADE!!!"'''''
40	** ''"We never play anything nice and easy. We play things nice and '''TWISTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!!!"'''''
41	** ''"Don't be afraid...of the'' '''''NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!!!'''''"''
42	* ChristmasSongs: The album ''A Twisted Christmas''.
43	* CoverVersion: "Leader of the Pack" by The Shangri-Las.
44	* CreepyCrossdresser: Their costumes invoke this.
45	* DeathByAdaptation: In the cover version of "Leader of the Pack" [[spoiler:it is the girl Betty who dies in an automobile accident in the rain, not Jimmy.]]
46	%%* {{Determinator}}: "Stay Hungry".
47	* DungFu: During the 1982 Reading Festival, which is already a traditional location of [[ProducePelting patrons tossing fruit and bottles]] (Dee Snider downright interrupted saying those aiming for the stage were hitting people in the front rows, and the hecklers actually stopped for a while), one of the audience members actually crapped out a turd and flung it at the band.
48	* EveryoneHasStandards: During the club days, the band and its fans were a big part of the anti-Disco backlash. One of the things they did, hanging a Music/BarryWhite effigy during concerts, was stopped once a gig in upstate New York raised racist chants from the crowd, making the group realize they didn't need that kind of support.
49	* HairMetal: Although the genre's alternate name, Glam Metal, was rejected by Snider given they're anything but glamourous!
50	%%* HeavyMeta: "I Wanna Rock".
51	* HeavyMetal: While their sound is usually on the HardRock side, songs like "Under the Blade" lean closer to metal.
52	* [[SheCleansUpNicely He Cleans Up Nicely]]: Compare Dee Snider in the above photo, and [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Dee_Snider_2009.jpg how he looked in 2009.]]
53	%%* HesBack: "The Kids are Back"
54	* IAmTheBand: Jay-Jay French started the band, but Dee Snider ''was'' Twisted Sister.
55	* IconicItem: Eddie Ojeda's bulls-eye guitar (traditionally pinkblack, redblack in the band's later years).
56	* InstantConvertible: Happens to the girl's car in the music video for "Leader of the Pack".
57	* LargeHam:
58	** All the band, but especially Dee Snider, are remembered for their garish clothing and wigs and in-your-face attitude.
59	** The teacher in the music video for "I Wanna Rock" and father in "We're Not Gonna Take It" (played by the same guy) are both very shouty.
60	* LongRunnerLineUp: The guys in the page image played together only for four years originally (when the drummer joined in 1982, and when he left for his former band in 1986) but remained together ever since the reformation in 2003 (not counting brief reunions in-between) until the drummer died in 2015.
61	* TheNeidermeyer: Played by Creator/MarkMetcalf himself in the videos for "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock".
62	* NonActorVehicle: Snider wrote and produced ''[=Strangeland=]'' about a psychopath obsessed with body modification. It was truly the first horror film in the "Torture" genre. (he also managed to get the band back together for the first time to record "Heroes Are Hard To Find")
63	* PerspectiveFlip: This cover of "Leader of the Pack" puts the singer in the leader Jimmy's viewpoint. Combined with TheCoverChangesTheGender.
64	* PopCulturalOsmosis: The two above songs/videos were iconic, as was the band's trashy get-up. Other than those, most of the band's other work was hardly known by the mainstream public.
65	* PrecisionFStrike: The band's official fan club was called Sick Motherfucking Friends Of Twisted Sister (S.M.F.O.T.S., later shortened to just S.M.F.). Likewise, a documentary on the group is called ''We Are Twisted F***ing Sister!''
66	* RemixAlbum: "Still Hungry", while featuring some unreleased material, is primarily a harsher re-recording of "Stay Hungry" meant to be true to the band's original vision.
67	* RepurposedPopSong: "We're Not Gonna Take It" remains popular at sporting events, political rallies, and protests and has even been used in television commercials. Which makes sense, since Dee Snider dedicated the song to all the assholes he had to deal with.
68	* RevolvingDoorBand: From 1972 to 1987, they had four guitarists (Jay Jay French was a constant, but they also had three others), three lead singers, two bassists, and ''eight'' drummers.
69	* ScaryMusicianHarmlessMusic: Everyone looks hideous but the music is standard rock fare. Dee Snider is even known for his prowess in public speaking, such as the 1986 [[MoralGuardians PMRC]] hearing in the Senate.
70	* SesquipedalianLoquaciousness: From "We're Not Gonna Take It":
71	--> "Oh you're so condescending\
72	Your gall is neverending\
73	We don't want nothing, not a thing from you\
74	Your life is trite and jaded\
75	Boring and confiscated\
76	If that's your best, your best won't do!"
77	* ShoutOut: The spoken line "You're all worthless and weak!", heard in the background of "We're Not Gonna Take It", is a quote from ''Film/AnimalHouse'', said by Doug Neidermeyer to his subordinates in ROTC. The band's music videos take it a step farther: Neidermeyer's actor, Creator/MarkMetcalf, actually appears in the videos for both "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock", with Creator/StephenFurst (Kent Dorfman) playing the high school principal in the latter. Around half of Metcalf's dialogue in the skit portion of "We're Not Gonna Take It" is taken from ''Animal House'', and his wife even calls him "Douglas C." when trying to calm him down. Yeah, it's safe to say that Dee and the boys were fans.
78	** The ending of "Love Is For Suckers" shouts out to an old commercial jingle for Dr. Pepper.
79	-->''I'm a sucker, you're a sucker, he's a sucker, she's a sucker,''
80	-->''Wouldn't you like to be a sucker, too?''
81	-->''Be a sucker...love is for suckers.''
82	* {{Slapstick}}: A prominent part of the videos for "I Wanna Rock" and "We're Not Gonna Take It".
83	* [[SparedByTheAdaptation Spared by the Cover Version]]: In this version of "Leader of the Pack" the gender roles are swapped: [[spoiler:Jimmy watches (and lives) as his girlfriend Betty gets killed in an automobile accident.]]
84	* StageNames: Daniel "Dee" Snider, John "Jay Jay" French Segall, Eddie "Fingers" Ojeda, Mark "The Animal" Mendoza (born Mark Glickman) and Anthony Jude "A. J." Pero
85	* DunkingTheBomb: In the music video for "I Wanna Rock", TheNeidermeyer teacher tries to stop the band by throwing a grenade at them, but he ends up [[ThrowThePin throwing the pin]], and [[StickyBomb the grenade gets stuck on his hand]], so he jumps into the school swimming pool to try defusing it, but ends up getting blasted upward, hitting his head on the diving board.
86	* TitleTrack: ''Under The Blade'', ''You Can't Stop Rock 'N' Roll'', ''Stay Hungry'', ''Come Out And Play'', and ''Love Is For Suckers''.
87	* TrashTheSet: In 1980, the band was the last attraction in a club about to be closed down, and once the audience heard it from the musicians, they started to tear the place down. Twisted Sister subsequently were hired for three more of those "demolition concerts", including in the 2001 Odyssey club where ''Film/SaturdayNightFever'' was filmed.

Context Music / TwistedSister