Maybe Alice Cooper Wasn't So Bad After All

My parents thought he was the Antichrist.

Well, actually, they didn't take him all that seriously. To them, he was more King of Crap than Prince of Darkness.

Looking back, it's hard to blame them. Mr. Cooper, who sang the occasional ode to necrophilia and was given to guillotining himself and others on stage, was born to be hated by anyone over the age of 15.

I'm twice that now, but I still pull out records like "Killer" and "Welcome To My Nightmare" every once in a while and reminisce on all the creepy good times Alice and I had while holed up in my room with the headphones on.

Undeniably, much of what drew me to his music and shtick in the first place was the shock value and the priceless ire it inspired in Mom and Dad.

But that's not all there was to it.

EDITORIALIZING

For all his preoccupation with the freaky and frightful, Mr. Cooper was always an incredibly astute social commentator, spitting out what amounted to prize-winning editorials in three-minute bursts with a backbeat.

Songs like "Halo of Flies," "(We're All) Clones," "Aspirin Damage" and too many more to mention dripped with irony and intelligence. It was all very subversive stuff, but also very tongue-in-cheek, and anything but profane.

Which brings me to the cultural offspring of the infamous Mr. Cooper, which are most often nothing but profane, and lacking the slightest shred of artistic or intellectual integrity.

The most prominent of Mr. Cooper's heirs is one Marilyn Manson, who has been blamed for everything from the Columbine Massacre to the boom in body piercing and scarification (if you don't know what the latter is, believe me, you're better off).

While often profane and prone to exploiting violent imagery, Mr. Manson is not as easy a target as he initially seems. I'm not a big fan, but if I were 15, I probably would be, and for most of the reasons I liked Alice.

Mr. Manson, for all his shock-schlock largesse, can turn a twisted phrase with the best of them, and while his lyrics usually hit absolute zero on the negativity chart, he's an able handler of irony.

While it doesn't exactly take a genius, the average idiot doesn't come up with album titles like, "Antichrist, Superstar" and "Holy Wood."

Instead, the average idiot spits out crud like "Freek Show."

Wait. Make that two subaverage idiots.

Enclosed with the press kit on the Dec. 3 Insane Clown Posse show that Tom Makoul Productions is bringing to the Scranton Cultural Center was "Freek Show," the latest piece of utter garbage from their labelmates, a pair of absolute zeroes who call themselves Twiztid.

BEYOND TWIZTID

I call them crapola.

Here's why: They -- and most of their fans, I assume -- are obviously illiterate. Not to mention unintelligent, uninformed, unoriginal, unlikable, unlistenable, untalented, unredeemable, uneverything else.

Suck does not have enough letters to get the job done.

I tried to find some lyrics I could print to let Twiztid hang themselves, but their "songs" are so laden with violence, profanity, bigotry, misogyny and misspelled words, all I could cull was this lovely little nugget: "We cracked yo' head in half / It wasn't funny, but we laughed."

I found those sage thoughts at the "band's" Web site, "Serial Killaz Online," which features video of the two members killing each other with axes, images of naked women with their hands tied behind their backs and a Top 10 list of reasons why kids should drop their paper routes and sell crack cocaine.

DIRTY MOUTHS OF BABES

Reason No. 7: "Sellin' crack may be illegal, but at least ya' keep ya' dignity."

Reason No. 1: "'Cause if ya' don't get rid of that stupid paper route and get a decent job, like selling crack, yo' mother and I are gonna' have to ask ya' ta' beat it, son."

Cute, huh?

I shared my reaction to this disgusting sewer pipe of a record with an old friend and fellow Alice Cooper aficionado, expecting him to share my righteous vitriol.

Instead, he laughed, saying I sounded like all the "old people who hated Alice so much when we were kids."

I countered that it wasn't so much the profanity and violence that irked me so much, but the mind-numbing dumbness of it. "Alice may have been sick sometimes," I said, "but he was never dumb."

"But the old people called him dumb," my friend said.

I won't be calling him again for a while.

CHRISTOPHER J. KELLY is music critic for The Times-Tribune newspapers.

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