Geek obsession: Alice Cooper Why it’s daunting: Though Alice Cooper used to stage his own gruesome death on a nightly basis, he tenaciously refuses to go away. Sixty-four and still active as a recording artist, Cooper is synonymous with shock rock—a genre he’s generally credited with inventing—in addition to being a popular radio host whose Nights With Alice Cooper is one of the most lively, engaging, and musically encyclopedic shows in syndication. Cooper’s whole resurrection shtick, however, may have a deeper significance. A born-again Christian (though Evangelicals and other moral watchdogs have often tried to ban his records), he’s an obsessively self-reinventing artist with far more nuance lurking beyond his cartoonish façade than casual listeners might realize. That complexity carries over to his music. Born Vincent Furnier in Detroit before moving to Arizona as a teen, Cooper released his first single as the leader of the high-school garage band The Spiders in 1965, launching a rock career that in many ways parallels that of his Motor City contemporary, Iggy Pop. (Cooper references The Spiders in his 1970 song “Return Of The Spiders”—which may or may not have influenced The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, the equally self-referential 1972 album by avowed Cooper fan David Bowie.) In the late ’60, The Spiders morphed into Alice Cooper, a psychedelic outfit led by its lurid, newly eponymous frontman. Furnier adopted the persona of the face-painted, cross-dressing, chicken-sacrificing, self-beheading Cooper as a provocative ploy for shock-and-awe publicity, a marked contrast to the earthy vibe of the post-hippie era. Although there was a cynical motive behind Cooper’s transformation, there’s no denying that thespianism is in every spatter of his blood. Almost as soon as his group started unleashing anthemic hits in the early ’70 such as “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” “Elected,” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” Cooper began experimenting with the relatively untried medium of film-plus-music, helping create the prototype of the imminent MTV aesthetic. But his fortunes collapsed in a drunken shambles in the ’80s, even as a new generation of video-savvy musicians—including scores of heavy-metal, hard-rock, and new-wave groups he’d influenced—elbowed him out of relevance. Cooper’s brief commercial comeback in the late ’80s and early ’90s cemented his paradoxical status: a platinum-selling cult phenomenon. More than that, he’s become an icon, lauded by everyone from Bob Dylan to John Lydon and inspiring acts as widespread as Kiss, Misfits, Mötley Crüe, King Diamond, Mayhem, Marilyn Manson, GWAR, and Ghost. But like many icons, Cooper has an image that often eclipses the work that formed it. For every feral snarl and spurt of gore he’s produced, the Beatles-worshipping songwriter has dabbled in another genre, from baroque balladry to quasi-prog. In 1977—at the height of the punk explosion, when bands like Sex Pistols and The Damned were citing him as a godfather—Cooper told Richard Meltzer, “I always look at [music] as an enormous menu. I love to put on Burt Bacharach and then The Stooges, y’know, and then Laura Nyro.” This musical universalism, along with the melodrama and silliness of his diverse catalog and legacy, has made Cooper an easy artist to identify—but a tough one to dive deeply into. The story continues HERE By - Jason Heller A.V. Club
