Alice Cooper
Billion Dollar Babies

THE REVIEW

1) Alice Cooper : Billion dollar babies (1973).

Intro

The glam was the fashionable-musical peak of the masked rock, where the decadent cultural context sees the triumph of Dionysus over Apollo: the bacchic-dionysiac ecstasy of rock tribalism accompanied by the usual epidemics of youth fanaticism that suffocates the attempt to create poetry, an Apollonian message not tied to fashion and market laws. The mask of Dionysus is one with Hades-Pluto, according to Heraclitus, and is therefore an omen of death, where the singer-prophet is no longer the messenger-bard of a generation of youth, as were Dylan, Hendrix, Morrison, and Lennon (the latter two often linked in youth imagination as crucified prophets, yet Prometheus-Dionysus-Bacchus-Attis-Christ tortured and dismembered); to a lesser extent one can mention Mick Jagger, and still quantify the meteor Syd Barrett, whose creeping cult has become a sort of elitist religion, artfully fueled by the same Pink Floyd - see Wish you were here, The Wall). The glam will reinvent these figures of generational "prophets" in an apocalyptic clone-clown, creating in the rock-songwriter a degenerate electronic trickster, a joker without a court, estranged and fashionable, intellectual and jester, singing great songs and little songs with often mystifying messages.

 1) Alice Cooper : Billion dollar babies (1973).

Vincent Furnier by birth, earns the No.1 spot in the 70s glam rock chart: the most jester-like, the most grand-guignol, a true punk ante litteram: the early Sex Pistols clearly took inspiration from him – note certain crude vocalizations in Johnny Rotten's voice. In fact, legend has it that Rotten was discovered while humming an Alice piece.

From Detroit with fury, Alice Cooper debuted with his group in Los Angeles in 1968-69 drawing inspiration from Frank Zappa, who decided to produce them when he saw the band's negative energy – the audience left the halls after the first screeching notes. A rock music, television, and horror film enthusiast, Furnier started performing on stage as early as school times, with parodies of the Beatles and theatrical hangings. After two very particular albums of psychedelia and post-beat, when he arrives at Billion dollar babies, he is already a star, buoyed by the sales of youth anthems I'm eighteen and School's out. His shows with snakes and adolescent theaters of the absurd draw crowds, up to the famous launch of the dead chicken, sparking ire from animal rights activists and beyond, so much so that the scene was immortalized in the Who's song "Put the money down" where Daltrey sings indignantly: "there are bands killing chicken!". Even Salvador Dalí chooses him as his disciple, dedicating a holographic painting to him. Produced by Bob Ezrin, (future co-producer of The wall), the album opens with the epic Hello Hooray, a self-celebratory anthem that serves as a counterpoint to Five Years by Ziggy Stardust: "...roll -out with with your American dream and its recruits...with your circus freaks and hula hoops...I've been waiting so long to sing my song...I was the only one."

Thus begins the violent circus parade of stereotypical figures from the repertoire of the average American, which Cooper mockingly ridicules à la Zappa: the girls robbing the idiots on shore leave in Raped and freezin, the demagogic presidents of Elected, the child murderers of Billion dollar babies, the mad dentists of Unfinished sweet, the good Catholic boys beaten up in No more mr. Nice guy, the new drifting generations in Generation Landslide, the old tycoons clinging to possessions in Sick things, the love song for Mary Ann who turns out to be a man, the apocalyptic seal of I love the dead, -I love the dead- complete with a string quartet closure... the American dream is over and now breathes death and decay.

Heavy metal, cabaret, teenage anthems à la Chuck Berry, there's this and more. After him, there will come Kiss, New York Dolls, up to Motley Crue, Marilyn Manson, and the likes.

The band is also great, which will attempt a career of its own under the name Billion dollar babies with a single album Battle axe in 1973. The same goes for Bowie's band, the Spiders from Mars.

Alice has always been very clear about his music: "rock needs trash," he said in an interview with MTV, "when it gets too refined then it needs people like me to make crap music and tasteless shows." This statement speaks volumes about the intentions and the disenchanted irony of the prince of Horror Rock.