Elected! Rejected?

 

first in a series of posts related to the last time Trump ran for election (rather than for reelection)

Article for MTV.com, 2016, On Alice Cooper's "run" for President in 1972.

Forty-four years ago, Alice Cooper ran for President.

Okay, not really – but the singer and his group did release the single “Elected” in September 1972, timed for the final stretch of the Nixon versus McGovern race for the White House.  A bombastic blast of proto-punk fury, “Elected” proposed Cooper as the leader of “a new party, a third party, a WILD party” that would “take the country by storm”. The single was accompanied with an uproarious promo video, in which Cooper drives around in a Rolls-Royce glad-handing the voters and revels in the barrow full of donor cash wheeled in by his campaign manager,  a roller-skating chimpanzee.

The idea for “Elected” actually dated back to the previous Presidential contest in 1968, which inspired Alice Cooper to write a song titled “You Shall Be Elected”. That lyrical concept fell by the wayside but the tune survived as “Reflected”, a track on the group’s 1969 debut album Pretties For You. Flash forward to ’72 and Alice Cooper were now the most infamous band in America, thanks to their shock-rock concerts involving the dismemberment of baby-dolls and faked but hair-raisingly realistic executions of the singer by gallows and guillotine. Following the chart success of “School’s Out,” the group were on the brink of the superstardom they’d been chasing for four grueling years.  So they decided to jump on the election-year bandwagon and drastically remodeled “Reflected” with the original lyric restored and intensified. Instead of “You Shall Be Elected”, the hook line became “I wanna be elected”: a messianic power trip for a singer who justifiably saw himself as a leader of youth.  

Bob Ezrin, the group’s producer, came up with a shrewd ruse to generate the declamatory demagogue vocal that “Elected” needed. “To get the performance I had a full-length mirror placed in front of Alice on an angle,” Ezrin told an interviewer. “That way he could see his entire body in reflection.” Gesticulating like an orator, Cooper rasped out lines about how the “kids want a savior, don’t want a fake” and vowed that very soon “we’re all gonna rock to the rules that I make.” Ezrin added horns suggestive of statesman-like pomp and distorted bursts of TV newscaster voice-over in the style of Walter Winchell. After $10,000 of studio time and eighty hours of obsessive mixing, the result was one of the hard rock classics of the first half of the Seventies.

From its whiplash opening riff through Cooper’s abyss-plunging scream to the portentous descending bassline in the outro, “Elected” can also stake a claim to be punk rock four years ahead of historical schedule. The tone of apocalyptic glee mingled with megalomania anticipates “Anarchy in the U.K.” (Johnny Rotten was a huge Alice fan and his audition for the Sex Pistols involved miming to “I’m Eighteen” on a jukebox). There’s a lyrical preview of punk too: during the fade, Cooper reels off a list of U.S. cities that have “problems,” then whispers “and personally... I don’t care” – a glimpse ahead to the taunting nihilism of “and we don’t care” in “Pretty Vacant.”

Listening to “Elected” recently while working on my new glam rock history Shock and Awe, I heard another element of prophecy:  Cooper’s drunk-with-the-promise-of-power performance reminded me of nobody so much as Donald Trump. Like Cooper, Trump is an entertainer moving into politics, using showbiz techniques that bypass reasoned analysis and policy proposals and instead conjure a baseless aura of authority. When Cooper rants about how “you and me together / young and strong,” it sounds like Trump’s blasts of hot-air about America being great again, how “we’ll win so much”. There’s Trump Tower-like bling too when Cooper brags about being “a dandy in a gold Rolls-Royce”.

Long before Trump ever featured in its pages, Alice Cooper made the front cover of Forbes. In the financial magazine’s April 15^th 1973 issue, the band were held up as exemplars of “a new breed of tycoon” that had emerged thanks to the Seventies rock business’s bonanza of platinum albums and mega-grossing tours.  Beneath the headline “the rockers are rolling in it”, an interview with Cooper saw the singer describe himself as a true patriot: “I’m the most American rock act. I have American ideals. I love money!”  In another interview - with Bob Greene, a political journalist who followed his Nixon/McGovern campaign chronicle Running with a book documenting an Alice Cooper tour– the singer talked about his success in Trump-like terms as the result of a pure will to dominance: “It was nothing but positive thinking. I’m very competitive....  That’s my main life drive – being better than everyone else.”

 “Elected” was the taster for Billion Dollar Babies, the 1973 album that propelled Alice Cooper to mainstream megafame.  A brazen celebration of money-making, the album stomped on the last vestiges of hippie idealism still lingering on from the Sixties: instead of sticking it to the Man, why not become the Man?  Billion Dollar Babies’s packaging was styled as a snakeskin wallet bulging with cash; inside, fans found a facsimile of a billion dollar bill. The accompanying tour was the most spectacular and lucrative (raking in a then astronomical $4,000,000 for 64 concerts) that rock had yet seen. The group travelled between cities in a private jet with a dollar symbol on the plane’s tail.

In interviews Cooper described the album and the show as a celebration of decadence – then an in-vogue concept  because of the movie Cabaret. “It’s happening in the States now, all that German thing of the Thirties,” Cooper told Circus magazine’s Steve Demorest. “There is so much money in the U.S., and everyone has as much sex as they want. All we’re doing is reflecting it. I like the idea of the American Seventies producing a cabaret of over-opulence.... I’m a nationalist. I know the States is the best place in the world to live in.” Indeed Billion Dollar Babies concerts ended with the band unfurling the Stars and Stripes to the sound of “God Bless America”.

Dismayed pundits at the time took the commercial success of Alice Cooper’s sick-humor and cynical worldview as proof that the assumed link between rock and progressive politics had proved illusory. All those benefit concerts for McGovern played by rock bands had done nothing to forestall a landslide reelection for Nixon, self-proclaimed champion of the silent majority. Some critics outright identified Alice Cooper as Nixonian rock.  In truth, the singer had not even voted in ’72 – something he professed to feel ashamed about. But Cooper did say that “I wouldn’t have voted for McGovern”, mainly because the candidate was too wishy-washy and changed his mind so often. 

Generally, Cooper professed to find politics “so boring”, quipping that “if elected, I would impeach myself”. But while the finale to the Billion Dollar Babies concerts involved a Nixon lookalike bounding onstage only to be roughed up and bundled off by the band, in interviews Cooper expressed sympathy for the President,   embroiled in the Watergate scandal shortly after his reelection triumph. “I think Nixon’s got a rough job,” Cooper told Greene. “And if he’s guilty of anything, I don’t think it’s anything new. He’s just the first one to get caught. I think Nixon’s a star... He’ll go down as one of the biggest personalities ever to come out of the United States, just by being so notorious.... I would love to spend some time with him. I’d probably sit down and talk about golf.” That never happened but Cooper did get to play golf alongside Nixon’s VP and successor Gerald Ford in a celebrity tournament. In further bizarreness, one of the singer’s four homes was right next door to the Phoenix, Arizona residence of Barry Goldwater, hero of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and a failed Presidential candidate in his own right.   

Like the acting profession, rock has continued to lean left and liberal for the most part.  But the existence of right-wing rockers – Ted Nugent, Johnny Ramone, Kid Rock, Gene Simmons, Avenged Sevenfold, and Alice Cooper himself, who’s been described as a “quiet” supporter of George W. Bush but whose intentions in 2016 are undeclared– shows that there is no innate and irrevocable link between rock  and progressive politics. Indeed rock’s combination of populism and individualism arguably inclines more logically with a libertarian agenda than with socialism. 

When you look at the “rock star” version of rock - the model for misbehavior and excess that’s recently been so influential in rap – it becomes obvious that it has far more in common with Trump’s worldview than, say, Portlandia values.  “Rock star” rock runs on ideological-emotional fuel like vanity, wasteful splendor, and alpha-male display. There’s a reason why Trump soundtracks his stadium-concert-like rallies with songs like “We Are the Champions” and “I Won’t Back Down”, and why he could plausibly  add “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” to the playlist too.  Magical thinking, vacuous self-aggrandizement, an appeal to gut feeling and irrational uplift, us-versus-them postures: if not the rock candidate, Trump is at least the hair metal candidate.

Although a Top 5 smash in the U.K., “Elected” did not repeat the success of “School’s Out” in America, stalling at Number 26. Let’s hope this is an augury for November.

plastique fantastique

SOPHIE's posthumous album SOPHIE is out now on Transgressive and Future Classic - and there's some great stuff on it. 

An interesting piece at the New Yorker by Jia Tolentino looking at SOPHIE's career and work in terms of "plasticity" 

On "Bipp"

"black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel."

On SOPHIE'S early interviews:

"She’d picked the name Sophie, she said, because it “tastes good and it’s like moisturizer.” Her influences were “shopping, mainly.” She wondered if music could work like a theme-park roller coaster, leaving you nauseated and laughing, then leading you to purchase a key ring."

On SOPHIE'S process:

"Nothing else sounded like Sophie, because she made her sounds from scratch. She didn’t sample; she built each hiss and smack and boom by manipulating raw waveforms. She wanted to get to the “molecular level of a particular sound,” to understand why that sound “behaves a certain way when processed or cooked.” 

On SOPHIE's ethos:

"There was a sense that transformation was the point and the teleology; Sophie’s sonic plasticity pointed to interrelational reinvention, toward a truth that had to be formed in the primordial tide pool of a dark, pulsing room...... She had translated her life and her questions into these new sounds, evincing some personal ethic of the transhuman and the trans human, in which states of flux could be captured in digital permanence, in which alteration was how you approached the divine".

 

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As I have said before here, if any artist could have had a lengthy entry in the "Aftershocks" section of Shock and Awe, it would be SOPHIE. Below are my thoughts about "Faceshopping" and Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides

                                                                   

"Faceshopping"  is a digi-glam tour de force. 

                                       

Here's what I said about the video-single in the infamous C-tronica piece: 

"The 2018 song and video works simultaneously as a critique and a celebration of the idea of self-as-brand, drawing inspiration equally from 21st century social media and from the tradition of flamboyant display in ballroom and drag. A digital simulacrum of Sophie’s face—already a stylized mask of makeup—is shattered and reconstituted using computer-animation effects.

Further thoughts:

... What intrigued me about SOPHIE is this collision of extreme exteriority but then still a lingering belief in the idea of interiority. 

In interviews,  SOPHIE sometimes used the words "authentic" and "authenticity" as positive terms 

Some say that the album title Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides is intended to be read phonetically - "I love every person's insides"

An idea continued on the album's other single "It's Okay To Cry", which contains the line "I think your inside is your best side" 

Again playing on the contradiction between exteriority and interiority: the photographable pose ("your best side") versus deep hidden truth ("your inside").

Between selfie and self. 

Tears as a tear in the 2D image presented to the world. The abject inside leaking out.

The Superflat SuperSelf.   Surface as Shield. An inscrutable mask.

So there's a tension that is unresolved between the allure of digi-glamour (creating doctored images  - selfies or videoworks - and disseminating them for unknown eyes) and a lingering longing to be real, to be unprotected and honestly vulnerable,  nakedly pathetic even.  Because the truth is always weakness and damage. 

That is further enacted in the songs not just thematically but in the sound itself - a combo of super-glistening surface sheen and hyper-contoured sounds versus messy splurges of sound and tearing, shredding percussion....

The immaculate  versus maculate (the latter sound-palette evocative of stress, abjection, fragility, torsion).

A sonic dramatization of a fraught mental space caught between the opposed demands of exteriority versus interiority ..   expressive also of an unresolved tension between the idea of the self as performative and constructed versus the idea of identity as innate and fated. 

"Dramatization" is the word  - with the kind of music made by SOPHIE and others, there's a feeling that the music is staged. You don't  immerse yourself in the sound, lose yourself in it; you almost look at it. It enthralls you, but you remain external to it, at a distance: watching it as a sonic spectacle. A ceremony. 

That's why the phrase "tour de force" feels right. It's hard for me to imagine someone listening to "Faceshopping" in a habitual sort of way. It's too imposing. More like a show, an event to experience  rather than something that can accompany  everyday activity.  

A flagellant pageant of ritual rhythm. 

The opening salvo of lyric, as delivered by Cecile Believe - 

My face is the front of shop

My face is the real shop front

My shop is the face I front

I'm real when I shop my face

- also makes me think of a book I read for S+A:  Erving Goffman’s 1959 study of social life as theatre The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he formulated concepts like “impression management” and the “personal front.”  

The song is a deeply ambivalent commentary on the culture of art-I-fice and self-selling - identity as product.

Today's digi-glamorous Instaglam  spaces - a honeycomb hall of mirrors infinity infested by influencers (people paid to be seen - seen with products) - is like a decentralized and democratic version of the royal court.  A placeless place to be, a poser's paradise.  A festival of facades. (No wonder that the courtly world loved nothing more than a masquerade).

  References to pearls and glam(our) inevitably makes me think of this song: 

Me on "Mother of Pearl":

"Just as “Every Dream Home” has a religious undertow, “Mother of Pearl” references goddesses and the Holy Grail. But the most significant aspect of the song is the choice of mother of pearl as the trope of perfection (as opposed to diamonds or gold).The subliminal association is with the Virgin Mother: the whole song revolves around the madonna/whore dichotomy. Mother of pearl, also known as nacre, is an iridescent substance generated by particular species of oyster and other slimy mollusks.  Nacre is found on the inside of the shell, or on the outer surface of pearls. This pearlescent shimmer-stuff is a real-world analogue for glamour: an optically dazzling patina produced by an abject, formless biological interior.   Virtually imperishable, nacre exists right on the edge between the organic and inorganic, the mortal and the deathless.  It suggests that there is something life-denying, or least life-freezing, about glamour. Reversing William Blake’s dictum that “exuberance is beauty,” glamour replaces liveliness with a cold, still perfection: the pose, the photograph." 

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Thought for an essay: contrasting Poly Styrene and SOPHIE,  1970s rad-feminism and 2010s xenofeminism, "when I put on my make-up / the pretty little mask's not me" versus "Scalpel, lipstick, gel /action, camera, lights"

Art-I-Ficial

On X-Ray Spex and Poly in S+A:

"Marianne Elliott-Said picked Poly Styrene as her name as a “a send up of being a pop star... like a little figure, not me... a lightweight disposable product... that’s what pop stars are meant to be”. There’s an echo here of Bowie’s “plastic soul” and Ziggy as “plastic rocker”. As is the case with much punk, glam-turned-inside-out is what you get on the glorious Germfree Adolescents: tunes like  “Art-I-Ficial” cry out with a sort of jubilant bitterness, Poly unloosing her emptiness vengefully upon  a world that has made her generation inauthentic and  soul-less.  “Obsessed With You” blasts advertisers for whom every kid is “just another figure for the sales machine,” but also the impressionable, moldable kids; “I Am A Cliché”' and “I Am A Poseur” reflect back at society its own worst nightmare of youth-gone-wrong. “Let’s Submerge” and “Warrior In Woolworths” lampoon the concepts of rebellion and the underground on which punk itself is based. “The Day The World Turned Day-Glo” and “Plastic Bag” are hallucinatory consumer phantasmagorias - “I eat Kleenex for breakfast and use soft hygienic Weetabix to dry my tears,” “1977 and we are going mad! 1977 and we've seen too many ads!”-  like “Virginia Plain” soured and psychotic. 

"Identity is the crisis can't you see..."

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Related fragment: 

"Fueled by narcissism, our century’s great motivator, the hipster inflicted himself upon the world by way of his affinities, his special brands of choice. Then we bypassed the middleman and became the brands ourselves. “Life has become a performance, a rather banal and meaningless one. That may have been the case for centuries, but even more so now,” wrote Dean Kissick for Spike Magazine in 2021. “The only thing we can make now is ourselves; day after day, again and again.” Not only is this life of endless bonsai-pruning one’s public-facing persona bleak on its own terms, it also comes at the expense of real and lasting art. Today’s avant-garde make memes or podcasts; they generate discourse; they post."

- Meaghan Garvey on indie sleaze at GQ.