Twisted Sister’s Jay Jay French Calls Rock ‘n’ Roll a ‘Criminal Enterprise’
It's no mystery that many record labels and other facets of the music industry take advantage of artists. Twisted Sister's Jay Jay French has no problem sharing how he really feels about the rock 'n' roll industry, which he's called a "criminal enterprise."
As Cramer pointed out in the clip, Elon Musk tweeted last year that drug dealers know more about running a business than the majority of college professors. French then said that he wouldn't argue with that notion.
"I survived it, I survived the multiple ODs, I survived the multiple almost-murdered and so yeah… I guess so, I mean if he actually said that he kudos to him. I will take a street person's knowledge over any academic any day of the week in business because you learn how to do a deal with people in business so I will say that for sure," the guitarist added.
"And by the way, rock 'n' roll, let me be clear, is a criminal enterprise. The record labels are criminals. It's simple as that — they're just legal criminals. So when you're in a cesspool of criminality, whether it's obvious criminality, in other words, whether it's blue-collar criminality where someone is threatening your life with a gun or it's white-collar criminality, you're dealing with criminals," he continued.
French explained that those two types of crime aren't much different from each other, because you still deal with "sleaze, the lowlives [and] the lying," and that it's something you have to get used to.
Watch the segment below.
The rocker is quite passionate about how music and business go hand in hand — he released the book Twisted Business: Lessons Learned From My Life in Rock 'N' Roll this past September. A few months later, he filed a lawsuit against Harley-Davidson for trying to name one of their tires Twisted Sister, something that he and the other members of the band have been dealing with since they achieved massive commercial success in the 1980s.