Alice Cooper believes that contemporary woke ideology is excessive. He’s in the news for criticizing the trans gender phenomenon. Cosmetic companies who had endorsed him in the past dropped him from the lists of their endorsees. Predictably, Cooper is being smeared as “anti-trans” and “transphobic.” I grew up with Alice Cooper’s music and have understood his politics from early on. Like Frank Zappa (who discovered Cooper and gave him his first record contract), Cooper was uncomfortable with the cultural revolution of the 1960s. For Cooper and Zappa, art, music, and theater are vehicles for the expression of ideas. The cultural revolution was challenging the very liberal framework that guaranteed the freedom of expression.
Cooper is portrayed as conservative and right wing based on his comments. However, Cooper he has identified as a libertarian in the past. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that emphasizes free market capitalism, individual rights, limited government, and personal autonomy. Libertarians are anti-authoritarian and individualist, emphasizing minimal state interference in economic and personal matters. Cooper’s politics have been stable over his decades-long career, and his alignment with libertarianism explains his views with respect to woke ideology. For those of you who follow Freedom and Reason, you are aware that these are also my politics.
I will discuss more politics in a moment, but before I do, a brief biography of Cooper for those who may not know who he is. Cooper, born Vincent Damon Furnier in February 1948, has enjoyed a career spanning several decades as a rock sensation, recognized for his theatrical stage presence, making him one of the most notable figures in the realm of shock rock and rock more broadly. Along the way there was a great deal of gender bending, which was typical in the 1970s. I will dwell on the Zappa connection in Cooper’s early years because of the political affinity between the two artists and the cultural milieu in which both charted a unique path through rock music.
Zappa witnessed an Alice Cooper performance in Los Angeles during the early 1970s. As per Cooper’s account: “We were playing a big party in LA, with The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Love—all those great bands—and we came on next to last because we were the house band. Everybody in the audience was on acid, of course, grooving on peace and love, and then all of a sudden you hear this DA-NA-NAA-NAAA and there’s these insane-looking clowns onstage. We scared the hell out of these people. They were all on acid, we looked like we’d just come up out of the ground, and we didn’t mind a little violence onstage. That audience couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. It was like somebody yelled ‘FIRE!’ There were three people left standing: Frank Zappa, my manager Shep Gordon and one of the GTOs. Frank said, ‘Anybody that can clear a room that quick, I’ve got to sign.’”
It has been reported that Christine Frka, Zappa’s babysitter (Frka is on the cover of Zappa’s 1969 Hot Rats) proposed that Zappa offer Cooper a recording contract. Alice Cooper’s debut album, Pretties For You, was released on Zappa’s Bizarre Records label in 1969. Their second album, Easy Action, was released on Zappa’s Straight label in 1970. In a 1974 interview, Zappa noted, “We were the first ones to sign them. They existed. I didn’t put them together, but I put out their first two or three albums…. They came to my house and auditioned…. About a year after we signed them they started really costuming it up. But they were always strange.” According to a 1993 Pulse Interview, Zappa was the one who encouraged Cooper to wear women’s clothes on stage. It has also been reported that Frka played a pivotal role in shaping the band’s image.
While many artists during that period participated in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and expressed what today is known as woke progressivism, Cooper and Zappa worked from a different standpoint. Zappa was an outspoken libertarian known for his advocacy of free speech, individual rights, and limited government intervention. Zappa was aggressive in expressing his concerns about censorship, the erosion of personal freedoms, and government control. He was also very suspicious of what I have called the medical-industrial complex. He incorporated political and social commentary into his songs and albums.
Zappa’s testimony before the United States Congress in 1985 during hearings on music censorship, where he defended freedom of expression and criticized the efforts to regulate music content, was a remarkable moment for both politics and music culture. The Parents Music Resource Center, or PMRC, was an American committee formed in 1985 by a group of politically influential women, including Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Senator Al Gore, with the aim of increasing parental control over the access of children to music deemed to have drug-related, sexual, or violent themes. The organization gained attention for its advocacy of labeling music with explicit content and for its push to establish warning labels on albums containing such content.
The PMRC’s efforts were met with criticism from various quarters, including free speech advocates and musicians. The controversy surrounding the PMRC’s activities, including their list of songs with lyrics they considered objectionable, led to congressional hearings in 1985, during which musicians like Frank Zappa and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister testified against the organization’s proposed labeling system and censorship. Zappa’s appearance on the CNN talk show Crossfire in May of 1986 was also notable. During the give and take, he insisted that his problem with PMRC censorship concerned lyrics not the videos and album covers to which the host and other guest kept objecting.
In a recent interview with Stereogum journalist Rachel Brodsky, Alice Cooper discussed his history of challenging gender expectations during performances. However, he noted that some of his fellow theatrically inclined rock contemporaries, such as Paul Stanley from Kiss and Dee Snider, have started expressing doubts about certain aspects of gender ideology. Stanley was criticized for tweeting, “There is a BIG difference between teaching acceptance and normalizing and even encouraging participation in a lifestyle that confuses young children into questioning their sexual identification as though some sort of game and then parents in some cases allow it.”
Snider, was criticized for agreeing with Stanley. “You know what? There was a time where I ‘felt pretty’ too. Glad my parents didn’t jump to any rash conclusions!” After the barrage from gender ideologues, Snider responded, “I was not aware the Transgender community expects fealty and total agreement with all their beliefs and any variation or deviation is considered ‘transphobic.’” He wondered why his “lifetime of supporting the Transgender community’s right to identify as they want and honoring whatever changes they may make in how they present themselves to the world isn’t enough? Why not?”
In asking his question, Brodsky focused on Stanley’s characterization of trans phenomenon as a “sad and dangerous fad.” Cooper agreed with Stanley. “I’m understanding that there are cases of transgender, but I’m afraid that it’s also a fad, and I’m afraid there’s a lot of people claiming to be this just because they want to be that,” he opined. “I find it wrong when you’ve got a six-year-old kid who has no idea. He just wants to play, and you’re confusing him telling him, ‘Yeah, you’re a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.’”
Cooper argued that is is perilous not solely for young children but for teenagers as well. “I think that’s so confusing to a kid. It’s even confusing to a teenager,” he said. “You’re still trying to find your identity, and yet here’s this thing going on, saying, ‘Yeah, but you can be anything you want. You can be a cat if you want to be.’ I mean, if you identify as a tree… And I’m going, ‘Come on! What are we in, a Kurt Vonnegut novel?’ It’s so absurd, that it’s gone now to the point of absurdity.”he clarified, “I have respect for people and their individual identities, but I won’t advise a seven-year-old boy, ‘Put on a dress because you might actually be a girl.’” He elaborated, “I believe that individuals should have the opportunity to understand their sexuality before delving into whether they identify as a boy or a girl.”
Cooper argued that he looks at topic “from a logical perspective,” asserting, “If you possess these physical attributes, you are male. If you have those physical attributes, you are female.” However, he contended, “The distinction arises when you express the desire to be of the opposite gender. That’s a choice you can make later in life, if you wish. But you don’t biologically transition from being a male to a female.” His comments were similar to those of Stanley, who wrote, “There ARE individuals who as adults may decide reassignment is their needed choice but turning this into a game or parents normalizing it as some sort of natural alternative or believing that because a little boy likes to play dress up in his sister’s clothes or a girl in her brother’s, we should lead them down a path that’s far from the innocence of what they are doing.”
At one point in the interview, Cooper questioned the popular and organic character of gender ideology. “The whole woke thing,” Cooper wondered. “Nobody can answer this question. Maybe you can. Who’s making the rules? Is there a building somewhere in New York where people sit down every day and say, ‘Okay, we can’t say ‘mother’ now. We have to say ‘birthing person.’ Get that out on the wire right now’? Who is this person that’s making these rules? I don’t get it. I’m not being old school about it. I’m being logical about it.” It is top-down. It reflects the tyranny of the administrative state and the technocratic apparatus. Confusing children about gender is a critical step in reorganizing mass consciousness for future political utility.
In the United States, which was founded as a democratic republic, a situation has developed where rules—not laws—are used as means of ideologically-motivated social control. These rules are devised by bureaucrats, for example, administrators and organic intellectuals in the Department of Education and elite education programs, and imposed on the structure of public instruction through the mechanism of financial control it enjoys—when public schools receive federal funds they are tied to agenda that seeks to push down into the states systems the doctrines of the LGBTQ+ movement. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is another example of the top-down and administrative character of social control.
None of this is democratic. And it appears everywhere the same, as Cooper noted. It’s rather pointless to record that lockstep form and content couldn’t have happened by accident when we know exactly how and why it happens. Cooper, Snider, Stanley—these artists get what this is about because their main ethic in their lives is freedom of expression. It is how they can be creative. They’re artists. It’s how they can so readily distinguish between theater and the real world. If Zappa were alive I’m confident that he’d say the same thing (several of his lyrics express an antipathy towards the extremes of gendered thinking. Cooper, Snider, Zappa—they all have something in common: they’re libertarian or lean that way (Snider is defender of gun ownership and women’s rights).
The LGBTQ+ mob wants to lump libertarians in with conservatives and right wingers. They mean to suggest that glam and shock rockers are somehow traditionalist. Libertarians don’t care with who consenting adults have sex or how an adult identifies. All of these figures we’re talking about were gender benders. They’re products of a popular cultural movement in gender bending. What has happened in the meantime that a lot of people want to escape dysphoria by collapsing theater into reality. This is the postmodern character of transhumanism, where the simulation not onto becomes preferable to reality but those born into hyperreality can no longer distinguish between the simulation and reality. A man dressing in women’s clothing is no longer just that but has become an indication of a thing call “gender identity.” A stereotype used in theatrical performances has become the essence of the thing portrayed.
We used to understand the collapse of fantasy and reality in the mind of a person to be the surest sign of mental illness. Today we supposed to know it as the “personal truth” of the “authentic self.”
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