Hard Rock: Alice Cooper's The Eyes of Alice Cooper

I know it’s silly, the whole schtick of Alice Cooper, but I can’t help it. Cooper’s new album, The Eyes of Alice Cooper, is quite fun and even gets you thinking about God and making positive choices with your life. Really!

When The Eyes of… arrived in a package of discs from Eagle Rock Records (thanks, Rob!), I was skeptical. Come on, he’s still wearing the scary makeup, making himself look like death. His band looks like a bunch of guys who wanted to be in on the original but were still dressing up to go trick-or-treating not hanging out with a rock star. I know it’s silly.

But the music ain’t bad for some straight forward hard rock. It jumps out of the gate with “What Do You Want From Me?” proving that Cooper’s still rocking but also that he’s up on what “today’s kids” are doing (X-Box, Lo-jak, Target, “Buns of Steel”). There’s a couple of innovative tracks through in for fun—the appropriately creepy ballad, “This House is Haunted,” the clever “The Song That Didn’t Rhyme.”

What gets me, though, is how the lyrics lead right into discussions about God and the choices we make in life. “Man of the Year” is about someone who’s got it all, who is a knight, saint, and a president’s right hand man, but who is still depressed and wants to kill himself. Cooper sings in perfect irony, “And later I will meet the Lord/I’ll bet he just can’t wait/To meet the man of the year.” Simple hard rock sound leads right into a very thought-provoking discussion about how God isn’t impressed by our accomplishments (we’re still sinful), how having everything doesn’t make you happy, and generally a misunderstanding of how to approach God (proving yourself rather than focusing on what God has done for us).

“Spirits Rebellious” delves into the Cooper we’ve come to expect: the creepy, mean, “evil” guy who is obsessed with darkness and death, but read the song again and it is a confession of sin. We’re in church, standing before God, and Cooper is on his knees admitting his sinfulness to the Father in heaven. “I can’t do right when all I wanna do is wrong./My spirits [sic] rebellious./I know about the punishment. I know about the law./My spirits rebellious./My sins cut deeper than the teeth on a saw.” This is a very clear understanding of how we are turned away from God in our souls. Yes, unlike a sermon I would preach on a Sunday morning, it isn’t the hopeful song of forgiveness (“There’s a living breathing devil trying to tear my soul apart./In a cold, cold grave on a dark, dark night./Eternity is black./I’ll never see the light”). However, the song is asking the right questions, questions about the state of our souls and what that does to our relationship with God.

Finally, for a discussion on making positive decisions in relationships, go back to the first track, “What Do You Want From Me?” Here Cooper sings about trying to change his life in order to please a woman. He does some positive things: “I burned all of my porno,” “Dumped all of my girlfriends.” Of course, he doesn’t do these things for the best reasons: “’Cause you were PMSing,” “You say they annoy you.” Yet, the question repeated in the chorus leads right into a discussion about how to build a positive relationship: “Baby, what do you want from me?/I give you everything.” Relationships aren’t build on buying things. Relationship disaster is ahead when you change yourself so much to fit into the other person’s idea of a mate Out of the mouth of the blood splattered Cooper comes a future discussion about dating for a youth group.

I know it’s silly. I mean, with lines like, “Well I was born there/Probably die there/With all my long hair” (“Detroit City”), it’s not exactly the stuff of serious wordsmiths, but add some charging guitars and it’s quite fun. Add the fact that these songs actually lead you to more introspection and reflection on spiritual things than you thought, then you’ve got quite a good album.