ALICE COOPER – DRAGONTOWN (2001)

Last year, the murder rate in Chicago was higher than the much more populated New York City: over six hundred bodies (surely a sizable amount weren’t counted because they were never found), many of them spread heavily in a few relatively small neighborhoods. Here in San Francisco roughly 25 percent of murderers are caught, and only about seven per cent prosecuted. When a friend of mine was recently robbed at gunpoint while at work, the police proceeding was cartoonish, but not nearly as reprehensible as the way her trauma was handled at work – like it was a joke, it was over, get over it. Once a victim, twice a victim. The perpetrators, of course, are scum-ridden cowards, jabbering babies without a gun. With a gun, they are almighty God.

If the home-grown cretins weren’t enough we get the religious zealots with bombs in their shoes who give the homegrown cretins a sense of moral superiority – like the prison cretins who make life hell for the child molesters. Give me a religious zealot anytime. Memories of Union Carbide disasters in India, memories of Palestinian children killed with American-bought helicopters, memories of American-backed Indonesian genocide, memories of evil as a presence that isn’t merely a special effect on a movie screen. Jealous of the American way: I DON'T THINK SO.

Tick, tock, tick, tock … as the fuse shortens, the government immediately begins the crack-down. Laws are passed overnight – nobody knows exactly what they are or whom they will effect. The Bill of Rights means one thing yesterday – a new thing today. The Bill of Rights rewritten by George Walker Bush, who can’t talk, let alone read, write or think. The nation is behind him yelling – "Take our rights - we aren’t using them anyway." There’s a "war," or something, in Afghanistan but according to the CNN reports there really isn’t much going on. "Nope – we didn’t catch him – sources think he might be …."; Nope – we didn’t catch him – sources think he might be….. "; Nope we didn’t catch him … sources think he might be…" parroted over and over again as if NO NEWS is THE NEWS. There are millions of people in Afghanistan, but we don’t know how they are being affected. There are thousands of cities in the world but we don’t know what is going on in any of them. But Monica Lewinsky has a good enough agent that she seems to be on Entertainment tonight every other day with a new angle to be exploited by voraciously hungry newsmakers. THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

Alice Cooper’s Dragontown is a ass-kickin’ album that captures some sense of the horror, the lurking evil and moral lapses evident in society today. It’s ironic how ethical so many of these shock rockers are and how much crap they get from tight-assed hypocrites everywhere. It’s as if staring the devil in the face is some kind of crime. Cooper creates a potent cinematic landscape here. Call Dragontown an analogy to Chicago. The title tune invites you in: "Here you are – lying bleeding on a grimy street - Come on, come on – I’ve got something to show you … you thought it was over." Populating Dragontown are "Triggerman" ("I’m out of sight – a shadow in the mist I don’t need an alibi, because I don’t exist"); and "The Sentinel" ("My soul is calm as I sit here soldering my c2 bomb"). Elsewhere, a hyped up megalomaniac is challanging the divine: "Me, myself and I agree – we don’t need anybody else…, I want to be God. Why can’t I be God." And as you would expect the hypocrites are in heat: "Stuck my nose in the door, ended up on the floor in the middle of a nudie show. She danced in my lap – a couple hundred dollars later I was up on a morals rap. I was so offended as I sat for three hours; it was mental cruelty – I was so shocked. Just a little more flesh, just a little more blood – a little closer to the edge – a little deeper in the mud. I’ll never be the same." After the abbot and the bishop are through with her, "Sister Sara" is asking: "What ever happened to me – I can’t remember my name?."

Sting and U2 are artists who sometimes exude elegiac hopefulness and universal concern for national and international matters of the spirit – but Cooper may do them one better by just focusing on the sheer carnage of genocide in "Somewhere in the Jungle;" "A million bodies piled to the sky. Impossible to understand. Brother killing brother. The Serengeti’s bleeding and the scavengers are feeding. Wild animals show their teeth and run away in disbelief."

One of the saddest songs I’ve heard this year is "Every Woman has a Name" – right up there with "Alexandra Leaving" by Leonard Cohen. Innocence among the violence is so unexpected, that the heartfelt ballad is doubly emotional. Although Alice Cooper isn’t usually referred to this way – the album seems like a masterpiece. Dragontown is a summation – a clarification of what Cooper was always trying to say anyway – even though exploited sensationalism was sometimes the result. Alice Cooper’s union with guitarist/producer Bob Marlette is a match made in rock and roll heaven. In some places on this album – "Somewhere in the Jungle," "Sister Sara," "Every Woman has a Name," "It’s Much Too Late" – the vocal arrangements are so beautiful it’s almost as if Brian Wilson produced a Cooper album, with no subsequent lost of head-banging appeal.

About the only thing missing from Dragontown in these days of unquestioning patriotism and one-note presidential posing, is some good old rebellious questioning of the United States government. But if anybody could make a horrifically entertaining and morally jagged song about something like, say, Bill Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan hospital in Al-Shifa in 1998, which left thousands of disease-ridden people dead and suffering through lack of medical supplies, it might be that Alice Cooper is our best bet.

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