Waxing Nostalgic: Alice Cooper, “Clones (We’re All)”

By Jeffery X Martin

Oh, my gods, you guys, it’s 1980! There’s robots and test tube babies and shit! The New Wave is here, and guitar strings are quickly being replaced by wires. Dynamic stage shows are becoming starkly lit installations of performance art. Humanoid beings stand behind keyboards bathed in shadow, soundtracking Dystopia before your bionically enhanced eyes. Science fiction is now science fact and music has embraced it, just like they did the Crybaby pedal and the phrase, “Hey now, mama.”

It was a scary time for traditional rock and roll. Normal rock fans were scorned and mocked, gathering in the alleys at night like Morlocks, forced to live on the streets in makeshift shelters composed entirely of Rumours and Frampton Comes Alive! gatefold album covers. If rock and roll wasn’t dead, it was in a coma and we knew, we knew it was serious. We also knew if anyone could save us, it was the Son of Satan himself, Alice Cooper.

Yeah, I know Alice Cooper is the name of the band, just like Debbie Harry wasn’t Blondie. Really though, who wants to rebel against society because of something Vincent Furnier said? So, let’s just say he’s Alice, okay? Okay.

Alice did not show up to save rock and roll. Instead, Alice embraced New Wave and made it his own.

“Clones (We All Are)” may be the most efficient usage of the inherent sterility and conformity imagery in New Wave. It has the cold starkness of “Trans-Europe Express” while grasping onto the weird “Jocko Homo” sense of humor Devo would later patent. The guitars are used only in the background, almost submissively, as the keyboards take over. There’s a passing of the torch here. It’s still Welcome to My Nightmare, but the dream has changed. Hell is a surgical table in a white room and your personality is up for annihilation.

It’s a double whammy because who would have expected any of this from Alice Cooper?

This is the birth of a new kind of arena rock. No lighters in the air, no puff, puff, pass. This is the arena of conformity, a Riefenstahl Gestalt, the dying place of rock and roll as we knew it. Long live the New Wave.

If “Clones (We All Are)” steals from anyone, then it’s the band Icehouse, an Australian band popular in North America for about ninety seconds. Listen to Alice’s song back to back with Icehouse’s “We Can Get Together.” That’s a delicious sandwich for your earholes.

Check out this crazy video, too! Vinnie/Alice almost moves once in a while. His usual corpse-paint is gone, replaced with some kind of Sandinista fashion victim garb that’s even scarier than the Alice we’re used to. The Alice that hangs nurses, the Alice that loves the dead while they’re still warm, gone. Mistah Cooper, he dead. This is Alice as a hollow shell, much like the mannequins he so lovingly disembowels on stage, finally succumbing to and becoming the thing he feared.

Are we all clones? Perhaps. Alice’s message isn’t lost in this age of accordions, musical spoons, and neckbeards. But as you watch and listen, remember this. The year was 1980 and nobody predicted what it would really be like quite as well as an anomalous shock-rocker from the Seventies, a man who saw what was coming and knew enough to join in before the Decade of Broken Dreams ate him alive. Alice is still rocking.

Who will come forth to save us from the Aught Teens?