Alice Cooper

Ridiculous and brilliant -- OK, maybe not brilliant -- the appeal of Cooper's most ambitious concept album can't be denied. Mixing cabaret, gore and hard rock, Welcome To My Nightmare is a record that could only have come out amid the weirdness of the 1970s. "Only Women Bleed" is one of his very best songs.

The comeback of Alice Cooper, the singer, without Alice Cooper, the group, poses the
obvious question -- was it him or them? The obvious answer has always been that it was
Alice, whose star quality took him and his pals from being a maligned and second-rate
heavy-metal act to a premier singles rock band of the Seventies. That ignores the equally
obvious -- that the music improved more than the stage gimmicks or the singing.... More >

The solo debut actually ain't so bad--no worse than all the others. "Department of Youth" is his catchiest teen power song to date, "Cold Ethyl" his catchiest necrophilia song to date, and "Only Women Bleed" the most explicitly feminist song to hit top forty since "I Am Woman." Alice's nose for what the kids want to hear is as discriminating as it is impervious to moral suasion, so perhaps this means that the more obvious feminist truisms have become conventional wisdom among at least half our adolescents. Encouraging. (Grade - B-)