The Test Tube and the Scale

  There’s so much more going on than is necessary in the lyric for Clones (We’re All)—themes of conformity and paranoia culminating in loneliness and alienation, a science-directed social revolution conspiracy, the terror of living in a homogeneous culture—that it’s beside the point to claim the song’s about anything other than a generic vision of dystopia of the sort that was a fraction of David Bowie’s influence bequeathed by him to the rock and roll new wave. Released six months after the surprise success of Gary Numan’s Cars, Clones was Alice Cooper’s attempt at effectively mining that record’s commercial potential. The producer, Roy Thomas Baker, effortlessly integrates Cooper’s gratuitous embrace of cultural weirdness and rock’s most durable song structures into the synthesized marketplace of eighties pop idiosyncrasy. Baker performs the same studio hygienics that gave his work with the Cars such an inspired sophistication that an entire listenership could imagine a place for...

  We walked back from Ocean Beach on a late afternoon, Friday. The sky was overcast, as if the teeming void held by the Pacific had emptied itself into the space behind our atmosphere. Walking through Golden Gate Park, I couldn’t shake the sense of isolation imposed upon us by our recent visit to the sublime; we were silent on our return to Haight-Ashbury, largely an echo of the immense density of silence that is a hallmark of the natural world, and, which, at a certain geographical point inside those oceanic waters, can literally crush you. The core of silence I was carrying with me—the same one everyone carries, at all times—began to expand within the confines of my skull. Its expansion is potentially toxic, if only because it’s fueled by heat from what the mind tells it to believe. Brain chemistry, though more powerful than cognizance, can sometimes be redirected by the mere whims of consciousness.   The mood of alienation began shrinking once we caught a taxi outside the H...