Ultimate Guitar spoke to Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider about how the rise of grunge in the early 1990s forced most hard rock bands off the radio and MTV, with album and tour sales plummeting.
Dee was asked to share his opinion about the grunge bands such as Nirvana and others, saying:
“I loved them. When they first came out, it wasn’t even called grunge. And this is the thing about titles — even heavy metal, punk, hair metal, those are not titles chosen by the artists; they’re titles chosen by the writers. And usually as a negative connotation. Usually as a form of a putdown.
And the artists that they called grunge, called punk, called heavy metal — they hated it. This is a fact, dude. I’m old. I know this, a fact: if you mentioned grunge to Soundgarden or Pearl Jam, they got physically violent with you.
They were just a rock band. And if anything, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, they were metal bands. They were touring with Ozzy [Osbourne]. It just became defined by some writers; they pigeonholed it and called it a new sound.”
Dee added:
“When it first came out, I was, again, doing metal radio, and I was playing Alice In Chains, Nirvana and Soundgarden on my show, and I was like, ‘This is great heavy new stuff.’ So then it became defined as grunge, and then it was the hair metal killer, and that was awful.
“But I don’t blame it on the music; hair metal did it to itself. It became too commercialized, and then it got unplugged and became nothing but power ballads and acoustic songs, and it wasn’t metal anymore. It had to go; it had to change.”