Dee Snider was born on March 15, 1955. Snider was the front man for 80s metal band Twisted Sister, and one of the best singers of the pop-metal era.

Snider joined Twisted Sister in 1976. They'd been playing clubs in New York and New Jersey for a few years, and were struggling to break through to the next level of success. The band had gone through several membership changes (and would go through a few more after Snider joined), with the only constant being guitarist Jay Jay French.

With Snider as lead singer and songwriter, the band's sound began to change. The earlier versions of Twisted Sister had leaned a bit more towards glam and glitter rock; Snider gave them a harder edge and moved them closer to the mainstream of metal. Snider and French also had an entertaining chemistry, and their banter between songs became popular with the audience, to the point that some of their club shows had more banter than music.

Twisted Sister recorded its first demos in 1978, and a couple of their songs made it onto compilation albums released by a New York radio station for its fans. That success got them their first album deal, with the small label Secret Records, and Under the Blade was released in 1982. The production quality wasn't what it would have been on a larger label, but the album got enough attention that Twisted Sister was invited to tour as the opening act for Motörhead.

Snider was working on a new song that he thought could be their breakthrough hit, but Secret went out of business before he finished writing the lyrics. They were doing well enough by this time to sign with Atlantic Records, which released You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll in 1983. The album was mildly successful in the United States, and did quite well in England, where the single "I Am (I'm Me)" reached the top 20.

By the time Twisted Sister's next album, Stay Hungry, was released in 1984, Snider had finished that breakthrough song he'd been working on when Secret Records folded, and he was right about its potential. The song was "We're Not Gonna Take It," and it was the biggest hit of the band's career. The video was an MTV smash, featuring energetic slapstick comic violence (as would most of the band's later videos).

Those videos brought Snider and Twisted Sister to the attention of Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator Al Gore, who had founded the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC advocated for warning stickers on records, something analogous to the movie rating system, that they hoped would help parents keep their children from listening to unsuitable music. "We're Not Gonna Take It" was one of the "filthy fifteen" songs that the PMRC identified as deserving of such warnings.

In the summer of 1985, the United States Senate held a hearing on "porn rock." Members of the PMRC testified, as did three musicians—Frank Zappa, John Denver, and Dee Snider. Snider argued that his music had been misinterpreted by conservatives who didn't understand the genre, and that if children needed to be protected from unsuitable music, the responsibility for doing so fell to their parents, not to the government or the record industry. Shortly after the hearings, the Recording Industry Association of America agreed to put warning labels on selected titles. They were less detailed than the PMRC had wanted, simply reading "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics."

Twisted Sister's next album, Come Out and Play, was less successful, in part because the video for "Be Chrool to Your Scuel" was too violent even for MTV, which refused to play it.

In 1986, Snider went to work on a solo album, but Atlantic would only release it if it was labeled as a Twisted Sister album. Love Is for Suckers featured none of the other members of the band, and Snider's sound moved closer to pop than to metal. Fans were not happy, and the album sold poorly. Twisted Sister officially disbanded in 1988. A few years later, their colleagues honored them with Twisted Forever, a tribute album featuring performances of their songs by (among others) Chuck D, Joan Jett, Motörhead, and Anthrax.

Snider spent the next few years forming new bands. Desperado lasted from 1988 to 1990; their only album, Ace, wasn't officially released for almost 20 years, and even that was a small limited release. From 1992 to 1994, Snider fronted Widowmaker, which recorded two albums. From there, he moved on to work in other entertainment media. In 1997, Snider began hosting the syndicated radio show The House of Hair, dedicated to metal of the 1970s and 1980s. The next year, he wrote and starred in a horror movie, Strangeland.

Snider released his first solo album, Never Let the Bastards Wear You Down, in 2000, and Twisted Sister began making occasional reunion appearances. They headlined "New York Steel," a post-9/11 benefit concert for New York's police and fire departments. In 2004, they went into the studio to re-record Stay Hungry, which they'd never been entirely happy with; the new version was called Still Hungry.

In the 21st century, Snider has been a popular presence in reality television. He competed with other celebrities for a chance to record a country song in Gone Country, starred with his family in Growing Up Twisted, and got fired by Donald Trump on The Celebrity Apprentice.

And he began exploring types of music that you might not expect from a metal singer. He took part with other metal acts in the Frank Sinatra tribute album Sin-Atra, singing "It Was a Very Good Year." And in 2012, he released Dee Does Broadway, a collection of show tunes that included duets with Cyndi Lauper, Clay Aiken, and Patti LuPone.

On March 20, 2015, Twisted Sister's drummer, A.J. Pero, died, and the band announced a farewell tour. That tour included some concerts specifically designated as tributes in Pero's honor, and the band gave its final performance in November 2016.

Snider remains active. For more than a decade, he's been performing special Halloween concerts with a band called Van Helsing's Curse, inspired by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Christmas concerts. His original musical Dee Snider's Rock and Roll Christmas Tale premiered in Chicago in 2014, and he's released two more solo albums, We Are the Ones and For the Love of Metal.