Dee Snider has urged all other artists and music fans to use everything at their disposal to combat misinformation with regard to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The TWISTED SISTER frontman said that everyone should do whatever they can to attempt to circumvent state-run Russian media and communicate directly with Russian civilians who might be unaware or unable to access independent or credible news reports.

On Friday, Snider shared a four-and-a-half-minute video message on his Instagram in which he said in part: “Citizens of the free world, it is time to stand up and be counted. There’s a phrase I never thought I’d be saying in my lifetime, but here I am today saying those exact words.

“A week ago when I made my post about letting the Ukrainian people use [the TWISTED SISTER song] ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ as their battle cry, I was stunned by the international response, the international outpouring. A few death threats, but who cares about that. The main thing is that people stood with the Ukraine. People get what’s going on there. People realize the importance of what is happening at this very moment.

“People’s lives are on the line,” he continued. “People are dying. And this is a threat not just to the Ukraine; this is a threat to the entire free world. As a result of that, a movement has started. WorldUnited.live is not only looking to set up an international live streaming concert event, they’re looking to get the message, the word to the Russian people who have been cut off from the rest of the world. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all the social media platforms have been shut down. The Russian people do not know what their dictator leader is doing to the Ukraine; they have no understanding of the truth of what is going on. But they can’t stop all of us. We have our URLs, we have our web sites, we have our ways of getting information out there, and if we all start working those angles, if we all start pushing the word out there to the Russian people, if we all spread the word, not just of our support but of the atrocities that are happening in the Ukraine right now, the Russian people will get the message. They are the ones that ultimately are gonna bring this all to an end. Yeah, we’ve got politicians working; yeah, they’re doing all these things to cut back and starve them out over in Russia and do this and do that. I’ve always found, at the end of the day, it’s the people who make things happen.”

Snider added: “And to that end, WorldUnited.live — that’s the web site: WorldUnited.live — they wanna have a concert event, a major concert event, that crosses all musical barriers, all barricades, brings us all together to send that… Remember Live Aid? This has gotta be the next level if we’re gonna stop a potential World War 3, and it is on our shoulders to do just that.”

Last month, Snider made headlines when he said he was okay with Ukrainians using “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as an act of defiance against the Russian invasion. In a tweet, the singer allowed the use of his song and explained why.

“I absolutely approve of Ukrainians using ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ as their battlecry,” he wrote. “My grandfather was Ukrainian, before it was swallowed up by the USSR after WW2. This can’t happen to these people again!”

Snider sent out the hashtags “F–KRUSSIA” and “F–KPUTIN” in previous tweets and insisted that his grandfather would stand by Dee’s remarks if he were alive today.

Dee told “As It Happens” why he’s glad Ukrainians have found inspiration in “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as they fight a Russian invasion: “It was designed to be a song where people can read their personal strife and struggle, whether it’s your teachers or your parents or your government or an invasion — whatever. But then I started to get some people asking me, ‘Well, how can you support that, but you know, you denounced the anti-maskers?’ I was processing it and I was about to head out the door to get Saturday-morning bagels for my family, and I said, you know: This is why. And I wrote it down. And I came back a couple of hours later and opened up my Twitter feed, and it exploded, and I said: ‘Whoa!’ I didn’t realize I sort of hit the nail on the head. One group are fighting for their lives against oppression and tyranny for real. It’s a life and death situation. The other group are screaming that they’re being oppressed because they’re being asked to wear a piece of paper over their nose and mouth to protect others. It’s just so ludicrous, you know? And when you put that kind of perspective on it, it looks embarrassing when you see these true people fighting for their lives, struggling for their lives in the Ukraine, and you get these silly people … stamping their feet like little children.”

“We’re Not Gonna Take It”, the biggest hit single in TWISTED SISTER’s career, has been used in commercials for hotel chain Extended Stay America, Claritin, Walmart, Stanley Steamer and Yaz birth control.

The song’s lyrics say in part “Oh you’re so condescending/Your gall is never ending/We don’t want nothin’/Not a thing from you.”

“We’re Not Gonna Take It” was first released as a single (with B-side song “You Can’t Stop Rock ‘N’ Roll”) on April 27, 1984. The “Stay Hungry” album was released two weeks later, on May 10, 1984. The single made No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, making it TWISTED SISTER’s only Top 40 single, and the song was ranked No. 47 on VH1’s “100 Greatest ’80s Songs”.

“We’re Not Gonna Take It” was written solely by Snider. As influences for the song, he previously cited the glam rock band SLADE, the punk band SEX PISTOLS, and the Christmas carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful”.

TWISTED SISTER called it quits in 2016 after completing a farewell 40th-anniversary tour. The band’s last-ever concert took place in November of that year — 20 months after the passing of TWISTED’s longtime drummer A.J. Pero.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dee Snider (@deesnider)

MÖTLEY CRÜE bassist Nikki Sixx says that the band’s setlist for its upcoming tour will include “hits, deep tracks and some cool surprises.”

CRÜE’s long-delayed North American trek with DEF LEPPARD, POISON and JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS, which was originally planned for 2020 and later moved to 2021, will finally take place this summer. The tour, dubbed “The Stadium Tour”, will kick off on June 16 in Atlanta, Georgia and will conclude on September 9 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Sixx touched upon CRÜE’s setlist for the upcoming run in an Instagram post earlier today (Saturday, March 12). Checking in from his home in Wyoming, Nikki shared a photo of him with his two-year-old daughter — mother is Sixx’s wife of eight years, Courtney Sixx (née Bingham) — and he included the following message: “Early morning glasses club with Ruby!!-So happy to be home and missed @how2girl like crazy but I did have a successful time in LA working on new music with @fredcoury and seeing a few good friends. Great to spend the evening with @tommylee discussing #TheStadiumTour. Wait til you see the setlist. Hits,deep tracks and some cool surprises.@motleycrue Look forward to seeing @thevinceneil & @mr.mickmars and the whole crew at rehearsals soon but right now we need to get back to Motown Magic and some waffles. #ItsTheWeekend #HomeSweetHome #Family #RocknRoll”.

When it happens, “The Stadium Tour” will mark the CRÜE’s first live dates since wrapping its 2014/2015 farewell tour. CRÜE toured with POISON back in 2011 and DEF LEPPARD teamed up with POISON for a string of road dates in 2017, but the upcoming jaunt marks the first time all four acts have hit the road together for an extended tour.

Last October, Sixx told Germany’s Radio Bob! that he and his CRÜE bandmates will “start rehearsals in May” for “The Stadium Tour”. “I start training in December,” he said. “Now it’s down to hard work, getting ready, getting the band into rehearsal.

“We rehearse really hard because we will take a song like ‘Dr. Feelgood’ and while we’re building the show — let’s just say the show is… all the lights are moving, they’re green and they’re slowly moving — we’ll build a whole intro in and design the lights and the lasers around that,” he explained. “So it’s a long process and tedious. So we go to rehearsal and we might need to build in those 32 bars. And then we’ve gotta work with the lighting and the laser company. And then we’ve gotta make sure everything is organized so we get our count-ins for where we need to be onstage. So there’s so much going on.”

In a December 2019 interview with “Extra”, CRÜE singer Vince Neil stated about his preparations for “The Stadium Tour”: “There is a lot of sacrifice you have to do… from running around clubs to running around theaters to running around arenas to running around stadiums… the whole big difference, you gotta be ready for it.”

CRÜE fans who shelled out for the band’s 2014/2015 “farewell” tour were led to believe that the group would never return after playing its final show on December 2015 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The band touted the signing of a pre-tour “cessation of touring” agreement as cementing the fact it truly was the end of CRÜE’s life on the road.

On November 18, 2019 — three years and 11 months after the band played its last show — CRÜE posted a video with Machine Gun Kelly, who portrayed Tommy Lee in the band’s biopic “The Dirt”, explaining that due to the band “becoming more popular than ever” and “gaining an entirely new legion of fans” in the four years they’d been off the road, the band felt the need to blow up their previous contract in order to come out of retirement.

At a press conference in Hollywood announcing the CRÜE’s stadium tour, Sixx explained the band’s decision to return, saying: “Honestly, I don’t think any of us thought, when we were on ‘The Final Tour’, we would ever get back together. We weren’t really getting along at that point. We had been together 35 years, and it had been a lot of years on the road. I don’t think we took a lot of time for ourselves off; we were just constantly touring for all that time. And when it came to the end, we broke the band up and everybody went their own ways.”

Sixx continued: “It was during the making of ‘The Dirt’ movie, we started working on the script, started being on the set, we started hanging out again together. And I think we really started to realize — without even talking about the music — how much we missed each other. And then that got us to go in the recording studio, which is where the whole thing always starts for all of us.”

“The Dirt”, a film adaptation of the CRÜE’s 2001 memoir, featured four new songs recorded by the band expressly for the soundtrack.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by —Nikki Sixx— (@nikkisixxpixx)

Black metal has undergone so many transformations and mutations over the last few decades that it is sometimes easy to overlook the simple thrill of bands like DARK FUNERAL. Always popular but never quite as critically lauded as some of their less direct contemporaries, the Swedes deal in big, brash and bombastic extremity that is never afraid to exert maximum heavy metal power. Consequently, nobody is going to be particularly surprised by “We Are The Apocalypse”, at least in terms of its creators’ overall approach. But DARK FUNERAL are so ridiculously good at this stuff — and Lord Ahriman is such an underrated but eerily consistent songwriter — that the fact that these songs are simply bigger and better interpretations of the same grimly brutal formula feels more like a selling point than a drawback.

Owners of exposed jugulars will rue their complacency when this album kicks off. “Nightfall” is the perfect opener: insanely fast and furious, it begins as an obscene, obsidian blastbeat tirade before erupting into a giant chorus, ripe for inciting a riotous singalong. And therein lies the key to DARK FUNERAL’s greatness, particularly at this point in their career. This is remorselessly extreme and black-hearted music, but with an unwavering connection to the art of memorable heavy metal songwriting. “Let The Devil In” makes the same point with equal intensity. Here, vocalist Heljarmadr’s rancid roar and venomous lyrics are crystal clear, and the riffs underpinning them strike a beautiful balance between discordant filth and triumphant, metallic pomp. Meanwhile, “When Our Vengeance Is Done” is so unpretentiously vicious and evil that it could be an outtake from the Swedish veterans’ debut album, “The Secret of the Black Arts”, from 26 years ago, albeit with twice the sonic power and sharper hooks.

As with 2016’s widely lauded “Where Shadows Forever Reign”, “We Are The Apocalypse” does feature a tune or two that dares to stray from the beaten, bloody track. “When I’m Gone” fits the bill here, with its ambling, tribal gait and hazy shades of post-metal, while “Leviathan” weaves arcane threats and moments of eerie restraint into a taut framework of mid-paced menace and neck-snapping blasts. There are grim depths to be explored, or you can just bang your head until you puke through your eye sockets, particularly during the closing title track, which is nothing short of berserk. Either way, DARK FUNERAL’s seventh full-length album hits the infernal nail firmly on the head and these are some of the best songs they have ever recorded. A simple thrill, but a giant, shudder-inducing thrill nonetheless.

Fan-filmed video of SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS’ March 11 concert at the Tropicana Showroom in Atlantic City, New Jersey can be seen below.

SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS kicked off a North American headlining tour on February 8, in Portland, Oregon. The trek is hitting 28 major cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Nashville, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and more, before wrapping up March 26 in Orlando, Florida.

SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS are touring in support of their new album, titled “4”, which was released in February via Gibson Records in partnership with BMG, “4” is Slash’s fifth solo album and fourth overall with his band featuring Myles Kennedy (vocals), Brent Fitz (drums), Todd Kerns (bass, vocals) and Frank Sidoris (guitar, vocals).

For “4”, Slash and the band traveled across the country together to Nashville, Tennessee and recorded the new album at the historic RCA Studio A with producer Dave Cobb (Chris Stapleton, John Prine, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile), revealing a stunning new sound and style all captured live in the studio. Cobb shared the band’s desire to lay down the tracks live, in the studio including guitar solos and vocals — a first for the group.

The band’s previous albums over the last decade — “Apocalyptic Love”, “World On Fire” and “Living The Dream” — have continued on an upward trajectory, all achieving Top 5 Billboard charting debuts in the U.S. and reaching the Top 10 on 12 major charts across the globe

The new album “4” has the added history-making distinction of being the first-ever album to be released on the new Gibson Records label, which is headquartered in the iconic American instrument brand Gibson’s hometown of Music City, Nashville. In light of the 30-year partnership between Gibson and the Grammy Award-winning Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame inductee Slash, it makes sense the new SLASH FEATURING MYLES KENNEDY AND THE CONSPIRATORS’ album “4” was made available via Gibson Records.