D.I.Y.

Twisted Sister’s Jay Jay French calls music industry ‘a criminal enterprise’

Jay Jay French of Twisted Sister has seen the good and the bad side of the music industry and concluded in his usual outspoken manner that it is nothing less than “criminal enterprise.”

When a recent interviewer quoted Elon Musk as saying that that drug dealers know more about running a business than most business school professors, French was off to the races.

“I survived the multiple ODs, I survived the multiple almost-murdered and so yeah… 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 concluded.

Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.

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