One of the great conjunctions of modern musical history occurred when Dee Snider discovered that the chord progression to "O Come All Ye Faithful" would make a great pop metal tune (and not one but two great music videos!). This great conjunction became the seed for Twisted Sister's last studio album, A Twisted Christmas, released in 2006. "We're Not Gonna Take It" has been at least as influential is "O Come All Ye Faithful" in late Twentieth and early 21st Century culture - I haven't been to many karaoke bars where the song wasn't shouted at least once in the course of the night (usually by the same group of rowdies shouting out Crazy Train).
Group of rowdies singing either "Crazy Train" or "We're Not Gonna Take It"
Snider publicly requested that VP candidate Paul Ryan refrain from using it in his 2012 campaign but expressed his approval at pro-choice activists using it in 2013. I'm on board with his politics 100%, especially after he and his crew visited Standing Rock shortly after I was there last year and ended up on the wrong end of the rubber bullets and water cannons during some of the more egregious offenses shortly before Christmas by the Morton County Police Department. Snider and the crew made a beautiful, powerful documentary-style music video in response, Snider telling the New York Post:
"To see U.S. government state and local authorities, along with hired private security, use this type of extreme violent force against unarmed American citizens in peaceful prayer is the saddest, most disturbing thing I have ever experienced. I’m glad we were there to capture the truth for all to see."
On the other end of the hair metal-in-politics diaspora, in 1999 former Extreme and then-Van Halen frontman Gary Cherone, a self-proclaimed Libertarian for Life, wrote a ham-fisted open letter to Eddie Vedder against abortion that Vedder and most of the world have now long forgotten. I only bring it up now because Extreme released an original Christmas song called "Christmas Time Again" for the second A Very Special Christmas album in 1992, at the twilight of their mainstream popularity and I remember being surprised at the time at how weirdly religious it seemed, especially as I was just coming out of my own weird religiosity. It's bombastic in both its music and its sentimentality, but also compelling (to me at least) even now.
And lest we assume glam rockers hung up the hair for their respective political issues after 1992, proto-glam band the Darkness (whom I never know how seriously to take) released the deliciously bombastic "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)" in 2011, complete with upper-register vocals and two-guitar attack: