Alice Cooper
School's Out
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The question before us is whether Alice Cooper is a threat to civilization itself or merely to our beloved rock & roll. Both parents and kids commonly see Alice as eroding the former, which they respectively deplore and celebrate. Alice is variously an actor, rocker, comic, madman and exorcist, the culmination of rock's subversive tendencies. This is the reputation he carefully nurtures. What School's Out confirms is what I have long suspected; that Alice's profusion of roles are themselves self-cancelling; that as a cultural assassin he is quite harmless. As a good old-fashioned American huckster, he is not harmless at all. To this paper he has simplistically asserted that "audiences
Read More are masochists ... all an audience wants is sex and violence." To New Musical Express, "there's actually no point whatsoever to our act." He has described himself as an actor first and a rocker second, a rocker first and a musician second, a pergator of people's darker impulses, a black humorist. This confusion comes through in his music: most of the time I honestly don't know how to react. I'm certainly not terrified or repulsed, though I sense that at points I'm supposed to be and am told that others are. I'm often inclined to laugh, but more at the burlesque of it than the satire. There is equally little sense that Alice's public aberrations are an outgrowth of his private demonology. Electric chair, noose, serpent, straitjacket–they are the arbitrary horror symbols of our society, calculated to trigger an immediate, intense and predictable response. Doubtless Alice is a little insane but nothing too serious; still, his act, which by this time has been thoroughly exposed to be precisely that, bears a more than accidental connection to Alice's offstage personality. As an artist of suspense, Alice is surely inept; like his visual props and his vocabulary, his vignettes are invocations, as if the proper combination of consonants and vowels should yield instant horror. His over-simplified formula patronizes his audience: if real suspense and fright are Alice's stock in trade, surely the occasional "blood," "dead babies" or the flimsy tales he hangs on them are short of what's needed to genuinely arouse. Most important, the story and its enactment lack the psychological plausibility which is necessary for real terror. As an actor, his characterizations are too extreme for us to suspend disbelief. To wax Aristotelian for a moment, the catharsis of which Alice speaks so often never takes place because we are never completely certain that it is just an act. He never has to be fully convincing dramatically because his private personality, which bears a relation to his stage role, is never, unlike that of all other good actors, completely shunted aside. Nor does he ever dare the greater challenge of acting (or acting out) his neurosis in Laingian or Janovian fashion, the way David Bowie, Arthur Lee and John Lennon have. Alice's self-s
After the hit-packed Killer, Cooper used this next record to challenge his audience. "School's Out" is certainly the most played song of his oeuvre today, but the album itself is full of interesting curve balls -- Broadway, faux jazz and less hard rock than people were used to -- making this one of those Alice Cooper records that bears many repeated listenings.
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