Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider has opened up about censorship, comparing today’s “left-wing PC people” to the right-wing conservatives of the ’80s.
During a conversation with Metal Wani (via Ultimate Guitar), Snider revealed he sees cancel culture as a “continuation of censorship.”
“Censorship, it always existed. People have always been trying to limit art and control art, and reel it in, and potty-train it, as Frank Zappa said, and as a friend of mine once said, the art has always pushed back,” he began.
He continued: “I kind of feel sorry for the people who are trying to stem the tide of trying to censor things, because every time they give us an inch, we push further, and if you look where we are today with censorship, you think back to a hundred years ago to Puritan times.”
“I mean, they would actually, literally explode if they saw what was passable, that the word ‘ass’ can be used on a primetime television show now, so we keep winning these little battles.”
“And the poor censors keep trying to, ‘OK, do that, but you can’t do this!’, and we keep saying, ‘OK, we’re gonna do this!’, and we keep pushing and trying to expand it, so that’s our job – to keep pushing the boundaries. And it’s their job to keep trying to stop us, that’s how it works.”
“This said, in the ’80s, that was a very right-wing, conservative, puritanical movement, traditional censorship. Now, we’ve got a left-wing hypersensitivity, PC world censorship going on.”
Love Metal?
Get the latest Metal news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more
“We’ve got people going, ‘You can’t say that because that offends people, and that offends people…’ It wasn’t about offending people back in those days, it was just, ‘You can’t say that.'”
“Now, we have to protect the young, this is, ‘That’s offensive.’ So there’s this hypersensitivity, hyper-defensive, hyper-protective, and it’s censorship just the same.”
“And I was very angry at one point during the writing process here when I found myself aware that I might be writing things that are going to upset people, and as a writer, look, metaphor is one of our prime tools.”
“Innuendo, metaphor, plays on words, that’s good writing – when you find a creative way to something.”
“When I was writing the song ‘In for the Kill,’ I found myself going, ‘Oh, wait a minute, ‘In for the Kill,’ ‘Fire at Will,’ people might be upset about that…'”
“And then the louder voice in my head said, ‘What are you doing?! You’re censoring yourself because you’re going to offend them? Let the lawyers tell you after you’ve written the song if we can’t put it down in the album…'”
“As an artist, your job is to be open, creative, and a free thinker. You’re supposed to let it flow and let pencil pushers worry about if you can legally get away with it.”
“And I was very angry at myself that I was actually questioning something that I was writing because it might, in this current environment, offend people, because I used that word, so it sucks that we’re still dealing with that, but I think it’s going to be an ongoing battle for eternity,” he concluded.
You can read more about this topic on the Metal Observer.
Check out Dee Snider discussing ‘left-wing’ censorship:
