According to The Onion last year, the members of Twisted Sister are now willing to take it.
But we'll pretend just for today that they still are in their full in-your-face rocking glory from 1984. Because today, 25 years later, Twisted Sister's multi-platinum "Stay Hungry" album is being re-released as a two-disc set.
If you were a rock & roll teenager of the '80s, you loved Twisted Sister videos. They were mini movies, featuring Mark Metcalf, the guy who played Niedermayer in "Animal House," parodying his character. "We're Not Gonna Take It" pissed off every parent in the suburbs when a guitar-playing teen riffed his Niedermayer-ish father through the upstairs window after sitting through a minute long spitting-and-screming lecture, before morphing into Dee Snider and taking over the house.
You remember -- "Is that a Twisted Sister pin? ON YOUR UNIFORM??"
Niedermayer was back in the sequel video for "I Wanna Rock," playing a prep school teacher who also gets trampled by Twisted Sister after an opening rant.
Yes, the in-your-face anthem of every 15-year-old rocker of the 1980s is re-released in two-disc glory today, 25 years later.
"We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock" took over the MTV airwaves in the mid-80s. The video featured the guy who played Niedermayer in the Animal House movies and gave him a second life in Twisted Sister videos that followed. Twisted Sister was on MTV in the '80s more often than Lauren Conrad is today.
And then they weren't. As quickly as they rose to fame, they vanished. They were at the forefront of Senate hearings about violence in music, with Dee Snider testifying and being called "Mr. Sister." MTV banned a video from their next album as offensive, perhaps because Billy Joel was in it.
So take a moment to remember one of the greatest MTV eras with a couple of Twisted Sister videos.