The song is instantly recognisable. The drum rolls that opens it are unmistakable, and you don’t even need the vocals to come in singing the song’s title over that beat to know what song it is.
But when it does, you’re already hooked.
We’re Not Gonna Take It is a song by the American heavy metal band Twisted Sister. It was first released as a single on 27 April 1984, but also included on their third album Stay Hungry, released two weeks later on 10 May. It was the breakthrough that the band had worked so hard for, eventually reaching #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. They would never repeat that success, and it turned out to be their only US Top 40 single, but it did bring the band into the major league.
Like most of the band’s songs, We’re Not Gonna Take It was written by vocalist Dee Snider. “I wanted to write an anthem,” Snider told NPR in 2018. “I’m from the Alice Cooper school of School’s Out, I’m Eighteen, you know? And Alice was very big on these anthemic songs. So I wanted to write an anthem for the audience to raise their fists in the air in righteous anger.”
For the first three albums, there was a lot of downtime when the band was recording. Snider used this downtime to work on ideas for the next album. This means most of their second album You Can’t Stop Rock’n’Roll was written while the band recorded their first album Under the Blade, and when they recorded You Can’t Stop Rock ‘n’ Roll, he was working on the songs for Stay Hungry. This was a very effective approach during those early years as it gave the ideas time to mature, and the band was never short of strong material when a new album was needed.
Given this, it should not be a surprise that Snider had started writing We’re Not Gonna Take It well before the band started thinking of recording the album it is on. The initial idea for the song actually predates all of their albums.
“I’d been sitting on the chorus for We’re Not Gonna Take It since 1979,” he wrote in his autobiography Shut Up And Give Me The Mic (2012). “I knew the hook was a killer, but try as I would, I could not come up with a suitable verse and B-verse (the second, different part of a verse).”
The inspiration to finish the song came years later, and it came from two bands – one of which was Def Leppard. Snider was listening to their Pyromania album in 1983, which made something click in his brain. “In studying some of Mutt Lange’s work with Def Leppard, I saw that a number of their songs were using variations on the chorus as a verse,” Snider told Songfacts in 2016. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Why don’t we try doing something with that.’ And that gave me the information I needed to come up with the rest of the song.”
Snider also gives a lot of credit to Slade, who more directly inspired the vibe in the song. “I’m a huge fan of the English band Slade and their incredible rock anthems,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Most of you will know them best for the Quiet Riot hit Cum On Feel the Noize and follow-up Mama Weer All Crazee Now. No, Quiet Riot didn’t write those songs, Slade did! Slade songs are usually uniquely comprised of a hook (catchy repeated melody and lyric) for the verse, a hook for the B-verse, a hook for the chorus, and a hook for… the hook! Jim Lea and Noddy Holder are amazing songwriters. We’re Not Gonna Take It is a full-on Slade-inspired romp. All of my anthems are. Thank you, Noddy and Jim, for the inspiration and songwriting lessons. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Credit for the song’s crowning touch goes to the drummer, A.J. Pero. “I had the idea of starting the song with a drum cadence, like in a marching band,” Snider said in his autobiography. “When I asked A.J. to come up with something, he created a hell of an identifiable beat! The minute people hear those drums, they immediately know what song it is.”
The song itself is an all-purpose protest song that can be applied universally to anyone or any cause. As long as anyone somewhere is standing up to anyone or anything else, this song will fit their purpose. This all-purpose approach was very intentional, giving the song a timeless quality.
“I always said that the job of the songwriting should be to create something that people can interpret and put their own situation into,” Snider told Songfacts, “and read their own concerns or passions or worries. Not to be super specific. But for the most part, songs lean towards being general, and that was always key for me with lyrical content. So with We’re Not Gonna Take It, whether I was singing about my parents, my teachers, my bosses, my peers, people around me, I felt it was important not to define it by actually naming names and singing, “Dad, you’re so trite and jaded, I hate my teachers, too.” And thus, the song has had a life in sporting events, at political rallies, at protests, pretty much anybody who’s not taking something from somebody else, they’re going to break into We’re Not Gonna Take It all over the world.”
We’ve got the right to choose and there ain’t no way we’ll lose it
This is our life, this is our song
We’ll fight the powers that be just don’t pick our destiny ’cause
You don’t know us, you don’t belong
We’re not gonna take it
No, we ain’t gonna take it
We’re not gonna take it anymore
As much as the song is forcefully pushing back against an oppressor lyrically, it is melodic and catchy musically. The guitars of Eddie Ojeda and Jay Jay French have a lot to do with this, nicely chugging along with melody and measured power. Ojeda plays the solo, and came up with a very melodic piece which is both hummable and another hook in itself.
The end of the song uses lines from the character Douglas C. Niedermeyer in the film Animal House (e.g., “You’re all worthless and weak!” and “Now drop and give me twenty!”). Niedermeyer is the antagonistic and aggrieved authority figure in those movies, and a natural target for a song like We’re Not Gonna Take It. When the time came to produce a music video, it was natural for the band to reach out to Mark Metcalf, who played Niedermeyer, to star in the video.
Metcalf takes on the part of the father, more or less basing it on the character of Niedermeyer. Before the song starts, Metcalf comes into the kid’s room and berates him, ending his tirade by asking the now-famous phrase, “what are you want do with your life”? The kid answers “I wanna rock!” The kids of the house transform into the members of Twisted Sister, and a cartoon-esque ‘battle’ begins. The father gets the worst of the band’s mischief, as he repeatedly tries and fails to get back at the band members. The video is humorous and with the possible exception of the father’s initial tirade against the kid, never comes close to feeling violent or threatening. It’s pure slapstick comedy, and the father figure gets his just desserts in the music video.
The video took off in a huge way, paving the way for Metcalf to return to portray an very identical protagonist – this time a teacher – for the I Wanna Rock video. The videos are built up very similarly and did very well, which Metcalf deserves a huge part of the credit for.
With frequent airplay on MTV (and everywhere else), Twisted Sister found themselves exposed to a large and more youthful audience. They quickly found themselves all over the media. Many thought of them as a new band, not realizing that they had been around for over a decade at that point and had built a large and loyal following especially in the New York area. On the Stay Hungry tour, Snider would often commend the fans that were there when you couldn’t catch them on MTV.
Ironically, the newfound popularity led to accusations from certain quarters that the band was now ‘selling out’ by starting to come up with more mainstream material like We’re Not Gonna Take It. Those people did not know that the genesis of the song predates most of their other material – a point not lost on Snider. “I had the hook for that song in 1980,” was Snider’s response to those type of comments. “I always laugh when people say, ‘Oh, that’s when Twisted sold out.’ I say, ‘Yeah, in 1980 when I had absolutely nothing and I was broke, I wrote that hook.’”
The newfound popularity made all sorts of people take note. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), a group led by Tipper Gore (wife of Senator Al Gore) and the wives of other political insiders pushed to get warning labels attached to albums with explicit lyrics. They compiled a list of fifteen songs in popular music that they found the most objectionable at the time. This list is known as the ‘Filthy Fifteen’, and – rather incredibly – included We’re Not Gonna Take It on it as the song was thought to promote violence. Not just that, but it beat out millions of other songs to make that list of lists of the very worst examples that popular music had to offer. Think about that.
On 19 September of that year, Tipper Gore and other members of the group testified at a Senate hearing on the matter. Dee Snider testified in opposition alongside John Denver and Frank Zappa.
At the hearing, Snider said: “You will note from the lyrics before you that there is absolutely no violence of any type either sung about or implied anywhere in the song. Now, it strikes me that the PMRC may have confused our video presentation for this song with the song with the lyrics, with the meaning of the lyrics. It is no secret that the videos often depict story lines completely unrelated to the lyrics of the song they accompany. The video We’re Not Gonna Take It was simply meant to be a cartoon with human actors playing variations on the Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote theme, Each stunt was selected from my extensive personal collection of cartoons. You will note when you watch the entire video that after each catastrophe our villain suffers through, in the next sequence he reappears unharmed by any previous attack, no worse for the wear.
“By the way, I am very pleased to note that the United Way of America has been granted a request to use portions of our ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ video in a program they are producing on the subject of the changing American family. They asked for it because of its ‘light-hearted way of talking about communicating with teenagers.’ It is gratifying that an organization as respected as the United Way of America appreciates where we are coming from.”
The PMRC totally underestimated Dee Snider that day, and his point that the politicians were guilty of listening to the song with their eyes (looking at the video and the overall look of the band) rather than with their ears was clear to one and all. His testimonial was not just solid there and then, but made a big impression far outside the political and metal communities.
After all was said and done, John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) put it all into perspective with his comment “In a world with major pollution and guns ablaze, they have to spend time picking on someone using foul language.”
The worst part? In the end the hearings did not matter, as the record labels decided on their own to put the “Parental Guidance”-stickers on albums anyway. From a business sense it wasn’t a bad idea, and they may have realised what a great sales ploy they were. Those stickers did not deter anyone from picking up those albums – they just made them cooler.
Ironically, in an almost mind-boggling change of heart from the powers that be on Capitol Hill, some years later politicians started chomping at the bits to use We’re Not Gonna Take It as their campaign song. Not bad for a ‘Filthy Fifteen’-track.
Some of the initial inspiration for the song did not become clear to Snider until years later. In the early 1990s he was riding in a van on tour with his new band Widowmaker, who were active between 1991-94. The guitarist Al Pitrelli was driving, and the two of them were discussing song plagiarism. Snider’s jaw dropped when Pitrelli suggested that We’re Not Gonna Take It had to have been based on the classic hymn O Come, All Ye Faithful. “I sat there dumbfounded,” Snider wrote in his autobiography, “as Al sang ‘O come, all ye faithful’ and ‘We’re not gonna take it’ back to back. Holy shit! I sang in the church choir until I was nineteen years old. I must have sung O Come, All Ye Faithful hundreds of times. Somehow the first six notes of it infiltrated my psyche and were transformed into We’re Not Gonna Take It. Thank you, God! Elton John once said that his biggest hits were based on the chord patterns of church hymns. He says the comfort and familiarity in them connects with the listener. I guess he’s right.”
This point was taken on board to such an extent that when Twisted Sister recorded the Christmas album A Twisted Christmas in 2006, they included a version of O Come, All Ye Faithful set to the music and arrangement of We’re Not Gonna Take It. They replicated everything they could, like the drum roll intro, the guitar solo, and any individual part of the song that worked with the carol. It really is done in the spirit of fun and always manages to put a smile on my face. The group’s take on the carol has even become one of their best known songs since their 1980s heyday, and they even created another comedic music video involving the band members crashing a couple’s holiday celebration in their home. As we see, the boy grew up and found himself with a new authority figure in his family.
In 2016, Dee Snider recorded an acoustic version of this song with piano backing to help out Criss Angel’s Heal Every Life Possible (HELP) organization, which fights childhood cancer. Angel directed the video, which was shot in the desert outside of Las Vegas. In the clip, real cancer patients are shown shaving their heads. Angel and Snider are both from Long Island and have known each other since the 1990s. Snider and his record company made the song available to HELP at no cost, and it is highly interesting to hear such an angry protest song take on a totally different and emotional form. The fact that it works so well speaks volumes of the song’s quality and durability.
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