Dee Snider Says Hair Metal Deserved To Die After Grunge

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No hair metal band was safe once Nirvana came in to tear everything down. 

A lot of bands had to play catch up with the scene and try their hand at something alternative. Twisted Sister never could adapt, but Dee Snider thinks that grunge was a good thing for rock and roll.

In an interview last year, Dee talked about how stale the whole rock scene was becoming on Sunset saying,

“It had gotten so watered down and so corporate and so predictable,” he lamented. “Bands were being assembled for their look. Whitesnake — the band in the video for ‘Still of the Night’ — was physically assembled for being pretty.”

They may have looked good on stage, but Nirvana kicked things into high gear once Nevermind hit the charts, and Dee was over the moon. For the anniversary of the ‘90s classic, Dee had mentioned the bands that had it coming once Seattle took over saying

“It got to the point where you get the right producer and the right songwriter … you get the right costume designer, and … do the video and you’ve got a multiplatinum act, yay! When that Nirvana album arrived, that first Soundgarden, the first Pearl Jam album, Alice In Chains — I was like, this is awesome, this is heavy.”

While grunge wanted nothing to with the kind of metal that was coming off of Sunset, Dee actually saw a lot of similarities to metal acts when he first heard bands from Seattle saying,

To me, it was metal; I didn’t see what was not metal about it. but then it started to become this thing where they [said] it wasn’t metal — it was this new thing. And suddenly, it became what was killing other bands. But I thought it was great when it first came out.”

Twisted Sister had fallen by the wayside at this point, but it didn’t seem to matter. Rock and roll needed a good kick in the ass, and Dee is more than grateful that the flannel crowd were willing to do it. 

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