Twisted Sister - Ridiculous make-up, genuine hearts

At the start of the Eighties, with the exception of those who revolutionized and reinvented the genre, the vast majority of metal bands worldwide still followed one of the two paths that had characterized the genre in the Seventies, confining it to or blurring it with hard rock: the first consisted of emphasizing decibels and hard rock (rhythm and blues) rhythms, the second in doing the same thing but for different purposes, namely to express meanings beyond the usual ones (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll) of hard rock. Throughout the Eighties, even once metal found its true dimension with Iron Maiden and Metallica, this hard rock residue remained, which critics have too carelessly lumped in with metal.

New York's Twisted Sister (formed as far back as '73) were nothing more or less than a hard rock band, though historically considered metal mostly due to the genre classification confusion that existed at various levels throughout the '80s and continues even today (now that hard rock is largely dead) whenever that period is discussed.

Both for the quality and power of certain songs, and for the extravagance of their attitudes and costumes, Twisted Sister immediately stood apart from the other hard rock/metal bands of the era (Scorpions, Motley Crue and a myriad of others), aligning themselves with that not overly crowded group of hard rock/glam acts whose forefathers are Alice Cooper and Kiss (both from Detroit). Irreverent as much as self-mocking, cartoonish as much as psycho-dramatic, Alice Cooper, Kiss and Twisted Sister (in an order that reflects not only chronology but also importance) represent the historic triad of hard rock/glam. Hard-rock/glam means power and melody in form; comedy and self-irony masking nihilistic tragedy and self-destruction in content. There is in these musicians all the sadness, melancholy and despair of circus clowns, manifested, as with the latter, in an excessive, crude and flamboyant way.

Twisted Sister's classic line-up consisted of Dee Snider (born '55) on vocals (a Robert Plant with a rasp, and for that reason far more compelling than the original), Eddie Ojeda and Jay Jay French on guitars (two masters of old-school hard rock, able to reconcile rhythm and blues riffs with Sabbath-style doom), Mark Mendoza (ex-Dictators, a garage/proto-punk and glam band where Manowar's guitarist Ross The Boss also played) on bass, and A.J. Pero on drums.

1982 saw the release of Under the Blade, which can be considered one of the most violent albums of the year. On stage and in the booklet, the band jokes around and goes overboard with make-up, masks and wigs of the most gruesome, kitschy taste, but in the studio there's room only for one of the saddest and most violent hard rock acts of all time, somewhere between the Dictators (for the rock'n'roll and goofy side), Black Sabbath (for the predominant color of the music: black) and Judas Priest (for the heaviest moments). "What you don't know", "Run for your life", "Destroyer", "Under the blade" (above all) are the best tracks, the heaviest ones, the most '80s (metal) and least '70s (hard rock). A tribute to the whole history of the genre (Kiss and Judas Priest above all) both in the riffs and in the lyrics, this quartet of songs nonetheless manages (thanks to the power of the sound and Snider's voice, recognizable among a thousand if nothing else) to be original and, a rare thing indeed, despite (or precisely because of) all that make-up and theatrics, to come across as sincere and real. The story of lived experience, in short, which alone assembles an indigestible mass of despair, resignation and abandonment that the violence (for the time; after the Metallica era it might sound like pop) of metal sharpens and exacerbates rather than catharting away. You can feel all the bitterness and dust of New York's underground-male world (meaning not the artistic kind, see Sonic Youth, but the purely thuggish one, see Lou Reed). Rarely does Snider scream outside the verses without actually uttering words, but when he does, he gives us his very best.

After You Can't Stop Rock'n'Roll (1983), where the title itself already reveals how Twisted Sister shamelessly borrow rock's most overused rhetoric, outwardly (through their masks and obscenities) stripping it of meaning by mocking it, and then use it to convey a direct, existential meaning — namely tragic, gruesome survival in the urban jungle — came what is unanimously considered the band's best work: Stay Hungry (1984). Far from redeemed, Twisted Sister, with a particularly inspired, "world-weary" Snider, couldn't care less about anything or anyone, devoting themselves instead to what truly matters to them: communicating their own real, squalid, irredeemable, punk reality. In the years when every metal band was either genuinely heavy or had crossed over into effeminate, saccharine pop-metal or hair-metal, Twisted Sister, returning to their more rock'n'roll roots and, on the metal side, to Black Sabbath (the great outcasts of the early '80s, amid all the violent, blistering machine-gun riffs that year brought), managed to satisfy almost everyone. Catchy and hard rock, but not for the sake of selling out or compromising, rather because melody suited them best to express the intimate feeling of futility, decay and inescapable malaise that always accompanied them in the New York suburbs. "Burn in Hell" is downcast, lived-in down to its very roots, mythological in how it's steeped in all the proletarian, crumbling epic quality of everyday life. Hyper-realism is Twisted Sister's true dimension — glam only as a joke, but when it's time to get serious, to tell their own story, they end up revealing themselves as among the most hardcore urban pessimists and fatalists. "Street Justice", introduced by utterly gripping, enveloping guitar riffs, gives way to Snider's rage and tears along with the instrumental backing: the scream is both an attack and a cry for mercy, ultimate loneliness, malaise oozing and exploding with all its petulance. This can rightly be considered Twisted Sister's manifesto song, halfway between tears and screams, romanticism and realism, vulgarity and intimacy.

"The Prince" is the tear-jerking ballad (perfect in its genre, incidentally) that always makes you wonder whether it's a good thing it exists or not. However, given what's just been said about the band's sincerity and passion, and given the quality of the song, it seems that, at least in this case (all the more so since we're talking about a band that was always poised and contested between hard rock and metal), the answer has to be yes. The song can be read as the desire to provide yourself with company and encouragement when none comes from anyone else (particularly from the person you love). "Don't let me down" carries a rhetorical AC/DC-style theme between doom and atmospheres coming straight from Black Sabbath (but also from the less mystical Blue Oyster Cult), marked by riffs that, though disguised, are still recognizably rock'n'roll (credit to guitarists who are at once classic and original). The chorus and the heart-skip never fail to land: while always keeping in mind that these are "simple" and "crude" songs, as all hard rock songs of the kind are, songs that stick in your memory but which, if overrated, unless you're a bit dim, become nauseating and feel plain stupid. "The Beast", along the same lines, does even better than the previous song, with a literally irresistible chorus (it's the verse that precedes, in an unfortunate aesthetic clash, the very pop-metal-'80s repetition of the title). "S.M.F." likewise delivers sublime passages and closing flourishes, immediately undercut (though not disowned) by stylistic and technical naivety.

More than a contradiction, it's a coexistence that places Twisted Sister somewhere between sacred and profane, beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, loud and soft, original and banal, futuristic and dated. Come Out and Play (1985) and Love Is for Suckers (1987) carried on, more or less wearily, that same tension between the romantic and the ridiculous, the inwardly earnest and serious versus the outwardly crumbling and caricatural — a tension that, in other forms and with different shades, would lead the worst glam/pop-metal bands of the late '80s to utter failure: just think of Poison's sexy-metal or Extreme's funk-metal.

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