We‘ve all had our days with him, and if you haven’t, you should brush up on your Alice Cooper because this man is the voice of the true America. Tortured, posed with a flirtation with nihilism, and washed up, America is the subject of Cooper’s better “psychological songs.” True, most people who have seen Cooper’s stunning stage shows might call them grim and gory, but that’s only looking at the paint instead of directly at the barn. This is evinced in “The Ballad of Dwight Fry,” which is frightfully deep, almost too dangerously so.
Like the best lyrics, it can deal with autobiography, mental disease, institutional corruption, and national decay all in one go. Take your choice, but be mindful. The choice you just made reveals more about the real you than any other choice you might make during the day. Sure, take the lobster at dinner, and have that midnight snack of peanut butter without question, but before you say Cooper’s lyrics are only skin deep, look in the mirror and say: “Welcome to my nightmare.”
Since this is a mere blog, and you may not have time to read a dissertation, I’ll keep my points brief. “I was gone for fourteen days, but I might have been gone for more,” is the first line, and while we deal with this fictive narrative ringing in our ears, we have to stop and ask: Where in America, the archetypal Fourth of July America, can one lose their timeline, their identity? The answer is the corporation. The corporation has risen from the depths of our Id, and while we were incarcerated in our own daily dramas, snuffed out the American conscience, and by way of a Keeper, has made sure the average Joe and Jane have “lost some weight there” (choose your associations here, but any choice you make will be dark); by way of a schizophrenic doubling, Cooper’s Fry is both American individual at a loss, and the voice of a possessive corporate Super-Ego (what you are is not paramount, it’s what “we, the corporation as American citizen, thinks…not you). And a better formula for a psychopathic breakdown there could not be. Cooper’s doubling of identities is one of the lesser known hallmarks of his craft (see his “Chop, Chop, Chop” trilogy for another delightful example of this process).
And as our “lonely life unfold(s),” we are assured to never truly trust each other, for as the video narrates symbolically: the night nurse will be around with her chart and her pencil; her job is to demean us with her narcotics, tighten up our straight jackets, and make damn sure none of us escapes, for if we do, America as the corporation knows it (and keeps it) will be no more.
