Donald Trump has notoriously had some trouble finding rock bands that will let him use their music at his rallies. Alt-rock icons R.E.M. and Blur’s Damon Albarn scorned the GOP frontrunner for using their music (R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe said, “Go fuck yourselves, the lot of you — you sad, attention-grabbing, power-hungry little men. Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign.â€), but Trump may have found an unlikely ally: Twisted Sister.
Trump will be using the band’s famous anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It†as the closing song to his rallies. The song previously had a huge reprise after 9/11, when classic rock radio stations around the country put the track back in heavy rotation. (’Merica.) The band’s frontman Dee Snider told Canadian Business, “[Trump] called and he asked, which I appreciated. I said, ‘Look, we don’t see eye to eye on everything — there are definitely issues that we’re far apart on.’ But thinking back to when I wrote the song and what the song is about, it’s about rebellion, speaking your mind and fighting the system. If anybody’s doing that, he sure is.â€
Snider, who was fired from Celebrity Apprentice in 2013, went on:
“Trump and Bernie Sanders are the two extremes. They’re raising holy hell and shaking everything up. That’s what ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ is about. And we’re friends. I have spent time with Donald and his family. I don’t think either of us expected that we would like each other, but you know, Donald Trump is a pretty chill guy … He’s a frontman. When that camera goes on, he furls his brow, he does his thing. Off-camera he’s very self-deprecating. He makes jokes about being too orange and about his hair.â€
Snider’s interpretation of his own song as “shaking everything up†is interesting, since Genius’s annotations on the lyrics don’t say anything about cataloging Muslims or building walls along the border or any of the ways in which Trump is “fighting the system.â€