Members of Mötley Crüe and Steel Panther Get into Online Diss Battle

A fairly harmless (and really quite funny) joke made by singer Michael Starr has resulted in an all out war of words between Steel Panther and Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx.

The conflict began when Starr and SP drummer Stix Zadinia recently did an interview with Little Punk People to promote their new album, Heavy Metal Rules (the band is on tour in support of the record throughout November — get tickets here). When asked “If you could bring back any metal god to bring back from the dead and join your band, who would you pick?”, Starr replied that he’d bring back Vince Neil. Technically speaking, of course, Vince Neil is still alive.

Which is a good joke! It’s not exactly a secret that Vince Neil looks has looked and sounded like crap pretty much this entire century. Any Crüe fan who says they don’t long for Neil’s halcyon days, when he more visibly gave a shit about the quality of his performances, is lying.

Enter Nikki Sixx. The classy thing for the Crüe bassist to have done would have been to ignore the joke or just laugh it off. If it really hurt his feelings for some reason, he could have gone and rolled around naked in his millions and millions of dollars.

Instead, Sixx went on Twitter and expressed outrage over the joke, saying that Starr “can go fück himself” and that calling Steel Panther “assholes” and “backstabbers.”

For his part, Stix Zadinia more or less laughed off the slam from Sixx, speculating that “someone needs some fucking attention” and noting that “In order to stab someone in the back, you have to have been somewhat cordial to begin with.”

But the true MVP of this little back-and-forth is whomever runs the Steel Panther Twitter account… because they dug up this interview, conducted circa 1994, when Neil and Mötley Crüe had recently split under acrimonious circumstances. In the clip, the other band members laugh about Neil breaking his ribs during a jet skiing accident and make fun of the singer’s weight:

Sixx hasn’t said anything else since his initial tweets, and if he’s smart, he’ll keep it that way. I can’t imagine anyone looking at this diss battle and not seeing Steel Panther as the winners. Which isn’t surprising! They’re basically professional insult comedians, and the funniest thing Sixx has ever done was Generation Swine, which wasn’t even meant to be funny I don’t think. Poor son of a bitch never stood a chance.