Alice Cooper - DragontownRelease: September 18, 2001
Genre: Rock
Label: Spitfire Records
Length: 50:48
Nick's Rating: 4/5
At times, it's easy enough to spot genius, even for the truly stupid. When you scan over rock music, you're bound to note the favorite genii of the average radio-listener in the Beatles, the Stones, Zep, et cetera; the genii of choice for the hipsters and neo-goths in Joy Division, The Cure, et cetera; metalheads' musical brains in Black Sabbath, Metallica*, et al.; and so many more. Sometimes, though, there are some that you do not expect to fill these positions, and yet, they do it deftly, fitting the throne as though it were built especially for them.
Alice Cooper is not the man you would expect to ever do this. He was smart, yes, but what did he do? Give Marilyn Manson his goonish costumes and make a few okay albums? Write a few hair-metal songs then fade away into Christian conservative golfer obscurity? Crank out shlock in the 70s then turn to shit? However, most people who say this forget a few things:
a) He was discovered by Frank fucking Zappa. Uncle Frank would not go out of his way to getCooper Vincent Furnier (back when 'Alice Cooper' was actually the band) onto his label if he thought the man was mediocre.
b) Marilyn Manson wasn't exactly his idea, and he... is indifferent, I'd say, to him.
c) "A few okay albums" are only the ones that sold, except the aforementioned hair-metal nonsense.
d) The hair metal was mostly just to either a) exploit that genre's typical listeners (you know, the guys who make pot shots at Donald Fagen just for his name) from 1986-7, or b) send a message in a medium that might be listened to from 1989-91 (well, in most cases, he was).
e) Most people are judging him by a maximum of five songs.
There's the rub, of course. Five songs, as many Muse fans hasten to tell me as I cringe at my radio, are not enough to judge an artist. You might be inclined to think of Cooper as only having developed the whole 'stage makeup' thing outside progressive rock and David Bowie. That may be. However, is it necessary to be a progenitor to be a genius? Wasn't now-deceased Voivod guitarist Denis "Piggy" D'Amour a genius? (The fanbase is inclined to believe so, at least) Did he invent technical thrash guitar? (Fuck no!)
It's this sort of genius that boils to the top with Alice Cooper's Dragontown, a fine, and wrongly-overlooked, album of the early 2000s, at a time when music was in severe self-conflict with no sign of an ending in sight. One of the major problems with this was that the then-common nu-metal artists, everyone from Disturbed to Godsmack to Otep and beyond, seemed to take themselves deadly serious. We're talking about Alice fucking Cooper here, though; if a Cooper album were completely serious, somebody's head would probably explode. (Again, Frank Zappa connection.) At the same time, though, Alice is not only less serious than these artists, but he's more serious (no, really), and has a real message (was there a message to Disturbed, et cetera?). On some level, you could say that Alice is overly preachy here, that he spends the album evangelizing on the nature of Hell and how all mankind are sinners. Well, yes, okay... but it's not like he's trying to convert us to Christianity, he's simply indicating the evils of the world. In all, agood message -- yeah, from the guy who wrote "School's Out."
It might be better to start this flea circus show at the very beginning, given its conceptual state. Generated in an era of semi-industrial hard-rock (following more along the Rammstein pattern, with its wry sense of humor), you'd be shocked to find that opening song "Triggerman" is basically just a psychedelic pop song with heavy guitar sounds as opposed to a lascerating 'links zwo drei vier!'-worthy death anthem. Boost this one a few more points with its lyrics from the point of view of Big Brother (with some mechanical effects applied to make the joke really sink in). What sets this apart from one of Alice's standard jokes, though? Black comedy has always been the Coop's modus operandi, situated somewhere between the nightmare and mildly creepy ends of the creepiness meter, but here Alice is intent on slamming it into the nightmare end. The first song is him doing his best to muster paranoia fuel incarnate -- and while he doesn't seem to be a master of that, "Triggerman" is at least a good rock song.
It's from here, though, that things take an interesting turn. A friend of mine called "Deeper" creepy. Said friend of mine had only ever been seen (by me) to be creeped out by one other thing, and that was Giygas. Even the second-most-nightmare-inducing boss I've yet run into, the mermaid boss in Rule of Rose, didn't much phase him. So, that stands as basically an explanation of how nasty this song is, as Alice leads you into an elevator straight to that place where Satan lurks. The fear of being trapped on a one-way street to the abyss, where anything could be lurking in the shadows, rides high throughout, and serves as the perfect introduction to "Dragontown," which is Hell itself, and appropriately dark and creepy.
For the most part though, the rest of the album is trivial, except the song "I Just Wanna Be God," which is a riot throughout, a truly humorous song that averts the creepiness of other parts of the album, but still proves that the Coop and his band are as great as they always have been... even if the band is not the same that came up with "I'm Eighteen" or, uh, anything on Billion Dollar Babies (you can choose your favorite), or even Welcome to My Nightmare. This is a much better band than chart success (yeah, right... the album scraped by at #197 or so without a trace) would have you believe. From here, the rest of the album is rather, again, trivial, but that's not to say you shouldn't listen to it. In terms of theme, the album retains a solid focus throughout and never stops being enjoyable, even if it's kind of preachy... but that's part of the point. The album succeeds on that level. One of the problems with the album, though, is that you might get bored with some songs, and particularly with being buried in social commentary on songs like "Fantasy Man" and "Somewhere in the Jungle" -- the latter of which, by the way, is certainly a haunting song about the Rwanda genocide, but, as would be expected of such a song, not easy to listen to.
The important point about this, though, is that, despite the occasional industrial and nu-metal stylings, this is essentially similar to just what Alice has always been doing, and the fact that it's been so forgotten is just unforgivable, especially since the media at large has a massive hard-on for 'classicism.' I recently purchased Stone Temple Pilots' self-titled album. Never in recent history have I heard so many uses of phrases such as 'Beatlesesque' thrown around. I just find it very odd that a media so obsessed with borrowing sound from classic rock records managed to only point out that this record borrows from a nu-metal sound and that it's a "good" record. The fact is, this record manages to visit the intended themes of the Coop's newest followers in the music industry, Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie, better that they have shown themselves able to. Songs like "Triggerman" and "I Just Wanna Be God" make the album a worthy purchase, while songs like "Deeper" and "Dragontown" show that the Coop is not only aging gracefully, but that he is still a true genius, because of just how many imitators he has generated. The 'nightmare' aspect Manson et al. go for in music, and which, in other media, something such as Eversion might seek, is done far better here than in such media, not to mention, the performance skill is great, considering it is, apparently, a nu-metal album.
By the way, I read somewhere that there's a 'special edition' of this album, but I have never actually been able to get hold of a copy of it.
*More well-read metalheads will tell you that this credit should go to Accept, among other bands, more than Metallica
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