Dee Snider

Growing up, we got told, we have the right to choose, and when people want to take that right away, we need to fight tooth and nail for it. And those people used to be the institutions, who wanted to enslave us within their degree factories, the system that wanted to get you working, borrowing and paying back loans, our parents, who didn’t know how to be our friend or anyone else that wanted to exercise their power over us.

And instead of choosing a way that is benefits us, we selected to became part of the machine.

But a corporation will never know us, so how can they determine our destiny.

And growing up under the shadows of the Cold War, obedience was a must. “Turn it down”, people said and all we did was put our middle finger in the air and turned it up.

Because at that time, we were living through the best era of rock and metal music. It was on a run, and no one could have stopped it.

So we lifted our hands in praise and screamed, “You can’t stop rock ‘n’ roll”.

But religious leaders wanted to ban it, control it and censor it. Heavy metal and hard rock was constantly under attack. So we banged our heads, put our devil horn fists in the air defiantly proud and blasted our music fast and loud.

But the religious leaders continued with their fear mongering while they slept with prostitutes and took cocaine. And like for like, they found support within the government and the government started a censorship campaign to “save the youth”.

But the youth didn’t care. We didn’t need saving. We knew what we wanted. All we wanted was to be inside the world of the rock and roll show, a perfect place to hide and feel safe inside.

Because this is the world we made, by showing our devotion and spending our money on the tickets, the t-shirts and the music. We had the patches to belong.

However, anything that reaches critical mass, struggles to remain there. And while everyone came out to play once upon a time, it was the start of the fragmentation of the audience.