THE VIDEO Twisted Sister, "I Wanna Rock," Stay Hungry, 1984, Atlantic Records
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SAMPLE LYRIC "I wanna rock! [ROCK!] / I want to rock! [ROCK!] / I wanna rock! [ROCK!] / I want to rock! [ROCK!]"
EXCESSIVELY DETAILED DESCRIPTION We briefly see a classroom filled with kids talking loudly and throwing paper at each other, then cut to a pair of legs clad in slacks and men's dress shoes striding in authoritatively (the sounds of the kids' ruckus still audible throughout, along with the sound of the shoes hitting the linoleum). Suddenly, all the kids stop what they're doing and face the camera, and one kid runs through the room to grab his seat.
The camera pans up from the feet as the teacher makes it to the front of the room, and in addition to the fact that he's wearing a suit and bowtie, we also recognize that its Niedermeyer, the mean ROTC dude from Animal House. He smiles maliciously at the students. He says "hello, students" and snaps his fingers, making (from the sound of it) a door close and all of the kids sit straight up in their seats.
Taking off his jacket, he continues, "School has begun. The summer is over. I am in command." The students all groan and look down, and he says, "What was that? For that little outburst each and every one of you will spend three hours in detention, today, immediately after school, in the basement." The volume of his voice increases as he speaks, and he begins to walk up one of the aisles between the desks.
He stops beside one desk, and we see him looking incredulous. "What do you think you're doing?" Then we see a chubby rocker kid, with longish brown hair and a jean jacket, looking sheepish. The teacher holds up a hardcover book on which the kid has just scrawled a large "TS" Twisted Sister logo. Continuing to look stunned, the teacher says "Twisted Sister?" He then begins to get pretty histrionic, while the kid nervously looks on. "What kind of a man desecrates a defenseless textbook? I've got a good mind to slap your fat face." With that last line, the teacher, now obviously sweating, grabs the kid's cheek in his hand.
The teacher continues on, now yelling hysterically. "You are destroying your life with that, that garbage. All right, 'Mister Sister,' I want you to tell me, no, better yet, stand up, and tell the class," as he pulls him to his feet. "Whatta you wanna do with your life?" The kid, standing there all pitifully, suddenly cries out in the voice of Dee Snider, "I wanna rock!" and with the first chorus of "rock!" spontaneously transforms into Dee Snider, just as four of his classmates instantly appear as the other members of the band. This causes the teacher to be blasted upward, out of his shoes (which we quickly see on the ground, smoking). His head breaks through to the floor above, which is apparently the gymnasium -- as he looks befuddled, a basketball bounces just in front of his head.
He continues to make panicky faces, and a basketball player (who we see only as a pair of legs) appears in front of him, dribbling a ball. Meanwhile, back in the classroom all the kids have left, and Twisted Sister have made their way to the front of the room, where they grab the teacher's wildly kicking legs. They push him up through the hole in the ceiling, and we see him fly through the air in the gym.
We actually hear him yelling, even though the song has begun. The teacher flies through the basket, taking the net and rim down with him, and we see the scoreboard give Twisted Sister two points (for those keeping score, its Twisted Sister 02, Teacher 00). The teacher, with the net and rim twisted around his head, makes a growly face.
As the first verse begins, we're outside the school where we see a guy laying cement (surely, that won't come into play later!). In the background, we can see a group of people advancing (the video's too poorly lit to really see who it is). For the first big "No!" we see a concert-style shot of a bunch of kids shouting along, then we see Dee in full makeup for his first big "nono, nono, nooo." Okay, now that the people are getting closer, we can see that it's Twisted Sister along with a bunch of fist-shaking kids walking forward. The guy laying cement stops what he's doing to gesture to them to stop.
Then we cut to the teacher, who's up on the roof of this sort of breezeway thing. He sees the crowd coming and looks back with a devious expression. He then crawls toward the other side of the roof. For the second round of "no"s, we're back at the concert again, first seeing Dee, then A.J. Pero, then J.J. French, then Dee again, showing off his pasty midriff. As we launch into the chorus, the teacher jumps off the roof at the kids running by below. Of course, though, he jumps straight into the wet cement that they're all running past.
Dee opens chainlink doors, then we see the teacher lift his cement-covered face with an annoyed look. We then see kids yelling "rock!" along with the chorus. There's one really overexcited blonde kid wearing studded wristcuff-style things who is kind of amazing. They all rock out, and we cut between them and Twisted Sister, who are there with them. We then see the teacher sneaking out toward them, holding a grenade. Smiling, he pulls out the pin, and then throws the pin so it lands right at Dee's feet.
We now see a shot that shows us that all the kids are sitting in bleachers beside a pool, with the band standing in front of them with their backs to the pool. The second verse begins, with Dee and kids singing enthusiastically, then we see the teacher grinning. He holds his hands to his ears waiting for the explosion, then realizes that in one hand, he's holding not the pin but the grenade. He looks over at the grenade in horror. After seeing Dee sing, we then see the teacher trying desperately to throw the grenade away, but for some reason it is stuck to his hand.
As the second chorus begins, with Dee crawling through the railing around the bleachers and the kids in the audience enthusiastically headbanging, the teacher jumps into the pool. On the second "I wanna rock!" we see the explosion lifting him straight up out of the pool with water going everywhere, even though when we see the band the pool water behind them is absolutely placid. The teacher's ascent is stopped by the diving board, which he sort of ricochets off with the bottom of with his head.
For the bridge, Dee & Co. go back inside the school, and now on the "rock!"s we see a line of kids banging their heads into lockers. These are interspersed with shots of Twisted Sister coming down the hallway. We then see the teacher making wily faces, and he starts to sneak through a door holding several sticks of dynamite (we saw him just a few seconds before setting up the detonator thing). As Jay Jay kicks into the guitar solo, we see the teacher crawling along the ground holding the dynamite in his mouth.
In the meantime, a butterfly is buzzing around the uh… I don’t know the word for this… the t-shaped bar you push down on to make the trigger the explosion. It's marked "danger." We see the teacher crawling behind Jay Jay's legs, placing him now somehow onstage behind the band. But outside, the butterfly has settled on the t-shaped thing, and its delicate weight is enough to push it in. The dynamite of course explodes, and the teacher is blasted straight up in the air in a giant plume of smoke. Somehow, this also causes the butterfly to explode (or at least, its wings to snap off).
The teacher is caught by people in the crowd, and the band continue to rock out. The crowd pump their fists with every "rock!" We then see the teacher crawling down one of the school's hallways. He opens a door marked "Principal" and crawls into an office as we see each member of the band yelling "rock!" The teacher pulls himself up on the desk, and the person at the chair behind the desk spins around. It's Flounder, the fat pledge from Animal House. He gleefully says, "Oh boy, is this great!" then sprays the disheveled-looking teacher in the face with a seltzer bottle.
THE VERDICT It's weird how many battles Twisted Sister felt they had to fight, since they're so patently inoffensive. Yes, wearing makeup in a most unattractive way is odd, but it in no way marks them as offensive in the way that the bikini-clad strippers and casual pseudo-occultism of other bands' videos might to some eyes. Never the less, Dee Snider in particular has always been willing to fight for rock, as a mostly self-appointed spokesperson for the metal genre.
It seems a lot of people at the time were not that into him as a voice for metal, but at the same time, you didn't see most of those lads testifying before the Senate, did you (you did however see Frank Zappa and uh, John Denver -- and no, for the record, I'm not happy about having to link to a site that bills itself as a "a conservative news forum," but it was the only place I could find the excerpt -- and honestly whatevs, because Dee has since gone on to make peace with Al Gore).
While I don't always agree with Dee's opinions on things, I will say that he is much more well-spoken than many of these folks as well as being a very thoughtful person, so its not surprising he puts himself into the positions. Hey, he was also the host of the original rock program on MTV, Heavy Metal Mania, which eventually got turned into Headbanger's Ball (sans Dee).
It is weird though that people would go after Twisted Sister, and the fact that they did has got to be all about the makeup. Everything else about them is very, well, teenage, for lack of a better word. Actually, pre-teen. The majority of their hit songs are pretty much about rock, rocking, and one's rights thereto. Their two most famous songs, this one and "We're Not Gonna Take It" are both basically about the struggle between headbangers and various authorities over the right to play music loudly (whether you're the one actually holding the guitar or you're just playing it over a stereo). Both feature almost exactly the same plot, with a hapless young male turning into Dee Snider and the dude from Animal House (in this video as a teacher, in the other as a father) attempting to thwart the band's rocking.
Both videos are very intentionally cartoonish. I have heard Dee Snider say multiple times that they wanted the videos to seem like Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons, and they definitely succeed in that. Honestly, practically the only difference is that we don't see Neidermeyer receiving all his bombs and stuff in big boxes labeled "Acme." They aren’t really violent (they’re actually a lot less violent than the Roadrunner cartoons). They’re basically fun, and definitely made to appeal to a young audience (the kid in this video looks 16 max, the kid in "We're Not Gonna Take It" looks significantly younger, maybe 14).
If I had been the PMRC (shudder, shudder) would I have been worried about the youth of America listening to Twisted Sister? No. Yes, all their songs are about rebellion, but only in a very mild sense. They seem really to be more about affirming the unity of the people listening to the music than genuinely plotting the overthrow of those who would make them "turn it down." "We're Not Gonna Take It" made the "Filthy Fifteen" for its "violence." But bear in mind that Madonna's "Dress You Up" also made it on for "sex"! Trust me, there are much more lewd innuendoes out there than "gonna dress you up in my love."
It's like once they'd made it past W.A.S.P. and Prince and his army of protégés (Prince, Sheena Easton, and Vanity all made the list with easily the dirtiest lyrics of the bunch -- the Prince song, "Darling Nikki," is anecdotally the one that started the whole mess. If only Kristen and Karenna hadn't had that copy of Purple Rain, America might be safe for rock!).
Okay, wait, I am getting off track. Point is, it's like they were looking for anyone to fill out the rest of that list just so they could keep the alliteration going (I guess "Filthy Five" didn't sound threatening enough). I guess the idea of the youth of America putting on blush and eyeliner was enough to make this band scary. It's weird to me because to my mind, hell-o, it's totally possible for guys to look hot in makeup, just look at Poison. But then again, other bands… I guess maybe we should be glad Iron Maiden never recorded a song called "Can I Play with Gender?"