I Wanna Rock
by Twisted Sister
- 108
- BPM
- D major
- Key
- 10B
- Camelot
- 51
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Dee Snider wrote and composed "I Wanna Rock". His band Twisted Sister released it on the 1984 album Stay Hungry. The video brings back Mark Metcalf, the actor who played the abusive ROTC leader Douglas C. Neidermeyer in National Lampoon's Animal House and who also appeared in the video for the earlier "We're Not Gonna Take It". Here he is a teacher with a similar personality, harassing a student for drawing the Twisted Sister logo on a textbook. He asks what kind of a man desecrates a defenseless textbook, echoing a line from Animal House. The student answers with the first line of the song, "I wanna rock!", and he and four classmates are instantly transformed into the five members of Twisted Sister.
The teacher's repeated attempts to stop his students fail and backfire. He crawls into the principal's office, where the principal is played by Stephen Furst, who played Kent "Flounder" Dorfman opposite Metcalf in the film. Furst's character suddenly approves of the band, reprises his line "Oh boy, is this great!" and sprays the teacher with a seltzer bottle. The teacher collapses.
"Goofy Goober Rock", a parody of the song, was performed in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie in 2004 by voice actor Jim Wise and musician Tom Rothrock. Snider said the licensing paid him a lot.
I Wanna Rock runs at 108 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.22 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 556 ms. It is in D major, Camelot 10B, which shares its notes with B minor and mixes cleanly with G major and A major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.