Music Industry Is ‘Criminal Enterprise’ Says Jay Jay French
Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French called the music industry a “criminal enterprise” and compared it directly to dealing drugs.
French, who also managed the band, said he wouldn’t argue against the suggestion that dealers know more about transacting business than people who teach the process in college.
“I survived the multiple ODs, I survived the multiple of almost murders,” he told interviewer Dean Cramer in a recent chat. “I will take a street-person knowledge over any academic any day of the week in business, because you learn how to do a deal with people in business. … By the way, rock ’n’ roll, let me be clear, is a criminal enterprise. The record labels are criminals. It’s simple is that. They are just legal criminals.
“So, when you're in the cesspool of criminality, whether it's obvious criminality … 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. You're dealing with sleaze, the lowlifes, the lying. You don't believe any of this shit because everyone lies. You kind to have to get use to it.”
You can watch the interview below.
Last year, French’s bandmate Dee Snider said they didn't receive any royalties for their work until 1998, and even then the payments were a “joke.”
“In order to get the band to reunite , the record label wiped our debt out," he explained. "That was 1997. The band had been broken up for 10 years, we had sold tens of millions of records, and we had not gotten one royalty check. … The ones we should have gotten [for] those big ones, we never got. In 2001 Napster came out, so a few years later people stopped buying records.”