Clones (We’re All). Alice Cooper. 1980. Warner Bros.

 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 itself in the world’s largest, cleanest discotheque; or what would then otherwise quickly become the refashioned Las Vegas. Cooper’s role in this is once again playing the sly and seasoned show business provocateur who, as early as 1971, sang “I wear lace and I wear black leather…I’m a priestess that’s gone to town.” Cooper shamelessly plays to his audience’s expectations—he’s as much the artistic hustler as was Bowie—occasionally upending them to satisfy our thirst for perversity. The lick of vagary that Cooper enjoys performing Clones can be heard in his vocal performance, stylized to resemble the sinister murmur of his Beatles’ Because cover for the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band musical. In that film, Cooper portrays Father Sun, a cult leader who serenades a roomful of brainwashed worshippers while Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees attempt to reclaim a stolen totemic relic from inside the temple where Father Sun practices his nondescript religion. Like the entire cast, Cooper overplays his role, and the film itself is generally regarded as a prime example of studio excess during a time of rampant drug use; the artistic product of a film studio flush with budget but creatively bankrupt. Our master of ceremonies for the culture of depravity built into the entertainment industry since its inception, Alice Cooper fearlessly, maybe helplessly, immersed himself so fully in the role that his struggle out of it became one of the most sordid public dramas of the late seventies. Little surprise then that as his record label Warner Bros tried applying a vacuum treatment to the studio record that would  inaugurate a new decade, hiring a producer from overseas to root out even the organic, microscopic life forms, Cooper brought with him the voice of his rock bottom, using it to assert the value of our disarray. Living free is a mess.