Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider blames “writers and journalists” for the underappreciation of metal
“Journalists tend to trivialise music, want to nickname it, and then dismiss it as being a fad,” Snider explained.
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Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider has argued that “writers and journalists” are the reason metal is underappreciated.
Speaking to Ultimate Guitar, the musician did not mince words when asked for his thoughts on why the genre is not getting the credit it deserves.
“I’m not hemming and hawing here or saying it’s you directly, but I blame the writers and journalists,” Snider said. “They historically have fucked over so many forms of music, changing their course forever.”
“I’ve researched a whole hell of a lot of what I’m talking about, and let me tell you – it’s a dark web of shit. Journalists tend to trivialise music, want to nickname it, and then dismiss it as being a fad. It happened with blues, jazz, grunge, heavy metal, punk, and more.”
He continued: “Now, remember these genre tags… These were not self-applied designations. Take ‘hair metal,’ for example; that was a name given to that form of rock music by a journalist who wanted to pigeonhole it into something.”
Citing Jazz as an example, Snider said that the genre was named so because journalists thought it was “frivolous music and silly”.
“And they labelled the blues the way they did because they felt the people playing it were whining and complaining,” he added. “So, these were not names that the people who played this music applied when it first came out; it was done so by other people. And then we get to heavy metal, Led Zeppelin was called heavy metal, but they were not heavy metal.”
“If you want to talk early metal, I mean, Black Sabbath was our heavy metal. So, it’s all bullshit.”
The artist also claimed that “metal has been marginalised by writers for years, just like all other forms of music have been at some point or another.”
“People don’t want to believe it’s real or has value, but it does,” he said. “They call Iggy Pop punk music, but there are thousands of interviews where he denounces that. And then the grunge guys, man, the grunge bands hated the term ‘grunge’ because, to them, it was another instance of people relegating to music that wasn’t real.
“It was like, ‘You’re grunge music. You’re not real rock. You’re grunge rock.’”