Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider has spoken out about the death of hair metal, citing a shift in the genre and commercialism to be the cause of the demise.
With hair metal quickly balding and vanishing, Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider spoke out about the death of hair metal citing, “hair metal did it to itself.”
Speaking with Ultimate Guitar, the iconic frontman noted that the early 1990s is when hair metal began to fade away, with the rise of grunge forcing many hard rock bands from the radio.
Although he stated that he first loved the sound of grunge, especially Nirvana, that the solidifications of genres quickly led many musicians to hate it.
“When they first came out, it wasn’t even called grunge. And this is the thing about titles — even heavy metal, punk, hair metal, those are not titles chosen by the artists; they’re titles chosen by the writers. And usually as a negative connotation. Usually as a form of a putdown. And the artists that they called grunge, called punk, called heavy metal — they hated it.
“This is a fact, dude. I’m old. I know this, a fact: if you mentioned grunge to Soundgarden or Pearl Jam, they got physically violent with you. They were just a rock band. And if anything, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, they were metal bands. They were touring with Ozzy [Osbourne]. It just became defined by some writers; they pigeonholed it and called it a new sound.”
When these new genres became mainstream, Snider admits that he was even playing them on his radio show when he was doing metal radio, thinking it was “great, heavy new stuff,” and became “the metal killer.”
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Although this was a contributing factor, Snider notes that he doesn’t blame the genres death on the music that was surging in popularity: “Hair metal did it to itself. It became too commercialised, and then it got unplugged and became nothing but power ballads and acoustic songs, and it wasn’t metal anymore. It had to go; it had to change.”
Check out ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ by Twisted Sister:
