Welcome to My Nightmare (I Think You’re Gonna Like It): Hermeneutics of Horror in Alice Cooper’s Metamodern Menagerie of Age

Abstract

In this article, I analyze three elements of shock rocker Alice Cooper’s musical theatrics – his vocal caricatures, his menagerie of self-reflective monsters, and his stylized choreography of mobility tools (particularly canes and crutches) – that give insight into the ways that he has navigated and expressed fluctuations in perspective on age(ing). Over the past half century, his stage persona has died on stage thousands of times—via guillotine, electric chair, hanging, or otherwise— but he has never had to get “old”. Every night, the character is reborn, revived, or reanimated: eighteen years old, even as the performer himself reaches twenty-one, thirty, and now seventy-five. This work— building especially on Mikhail Bahktin’s “grotesque”, Anne Basting’s sociology of age in theatre, and the study of opera, disability, and monsters – serves as an post-postmodern opportunity to consider unarticulated ways Classic Rock musicians contending with and re-present the genre’s founding themes through musicking.