Twisted Fucking Sister (2014)

Twisted Fucking Sister (2014)

This was a documentary focusing on the decade that Twisted Sister was a cover-band working the suburban New York bar scene. Frustratingly it ends when they get signed to a major label and all the interesting stuff starts happening, so you should follow this up with E!'s Behind the Music documentary. The goal of the doc is to convince you that TS was not some joke-band created in some marketing department to appeal to a youth demographic but a hard-working rock band that paid their dues in the nightly grind and had a real mass following. I was convinced of that but I didn't really care by the end of 2 hours about it. I can respect their dedication to enthusing a crowd but that's about it.

Outside of the glorious 'Were Not Going to Take It' with it's mixture of that primal drum beat and Howard Beale, there are no original songs by TS that are memorable. They took the volatile androgyny of Glam and made it into sturdy hetero transvestism (the TS logo was a topless woman with the American flag tatooed on her chest!) much like born-again, golf fanatic Alice Cooper did with Goth.  Their early gimmick was hosting drink-til-you-drop competitions that they acknowledge would be illegal today. They were essentially teenagers - no fault in that but not much interest either.



The real flickers of interest came around how the band channeled the cultural rage felt in this era (mid-70s/early 80s). Some of it was crude bar-scene scapegoating, the lead singer would single out non-enthusiastic patrons and get TS fans to chant "Get the Fuck OUt!" at them until they left, but there was the larger scapegoating of Disco. The band would lead chants of "Disco Fucking Sucks!" to great response, as they describe it the reaction was "like lighting a fire".  As one fan describes it there was "a real fight" between "dirty disco" and "real rock", between "the beautiful people" and "guys wearing jeans, t-shirts and sneakers".

Soon they were destroying disco records with sledge-hammers. Next they were lynching effigies of Barrie White...


[Screen capture from Twisted Fucking Sister]

The band denied any racial angle to their hated "because there were no African-Americans at any of the clubs" they played, but a tour to more rural clubs seemed to reveal the truth to them. When they brought out the Barry White mannequin (in a tuxedo with long curly wig) hung it from the ceiling and began beating it "like a pinata" with bat, the rural crowd went into a frenzy chanting "kill him! kill him!" The club owner congratulated them because "anyone who hangs a n***** is OK in his book."

The band apologizes for their unwitting racism and laugh at "absurdity" of it and the film continues. Yet the deeper question of how much racism, sexism and homophobia fueled the rage against disco is left unaddressed. Disco was a urban melting pot of soul, funk, and electro whose most famous singers were black women and men singing in falsetto; the TS crowd were white male suburbanites. The disco targets of Twisted Sister were Barry White and the Village People. Once they realized the racism of Barry White lynchings they replaced it by killing an effigy of disco songstress Andrea True in an electric chair. Racism gave way to the larger brotherhood of misogyny.

TS claims they didn't have "a prejudice bone in their body" and I believe them. It wasn't racism that prompted my brother to beat an effigy of the "agile criminal" Don King in a French class presentation - but it does have something to due with race. The fact that TS picture themselves as D&D-style barbarians as they attack a robotic Barry White (in the poster above) is no accident either nor the reference to a good rival band as "dragon-slayers". Strange cultural currents of fantasy, masculinity and race were mixing. The question of Rock V. Disco interests me because I grew up in its shadow, rocking out to Dire Strait's working-class movers complaining about "faggot millionaires" while 80s synth-pop completely seduced my soul. I thought "Were Not Going to Take it!" was one of the greatest rock songs I ever heard as a kid - and I will never deny the sheer catchiness of it.

The end of the 1970s was a volatile time in America - the oil crisis, the failure in Vietnam, Iran crisis, economic depression, the growing strength of women and minorities - and there was a seething anger: Howard Beale: I'm Mad as Hell and Not going to Take it!
Twisted Sister: We're Not Going to Take it Anymore! I think the parallels to the current moment are obvious: more oil woes, more lost wars, the 2008 bank crash, more trouble with Iran, the anger over BlackLivesMatter/transsexual bathrooms/Hillary Clinton.  Twisted Sister were an apolitical band (until the mixture of being a foul-mouthed bar band with a large kid audience got them in legal trouble), they just wanted to rock! But you cannot escape the era you exist in, and this documentary would have benefited from letting more of that context in.