Album Guide

Apocalyptic social fiction or non-fiction. Brutal Planet is a place that may start within the bounds of the former but, according to a scowling Alice Cooper, it is inevitable that the acceleration of the events, people and places within this spinning sphere will drive it directly into the realm of truth. A nightmarish and very real planet, served to you by rock's original conceptual storyteller, a man who has been swinging the lightning rod for generations of fans. Brutal Planet is riddled with riddles. It is a place that is bitter, cold and conversely swimming in furnace-blasted heat. It's your currently crumbling world next week and it's decadence that may not come to pass for another twenty or hundred years. All that we know about it is what can be derived and deduced from the mind of our tormented tour guide ... Alice Cooper.

Imagine Alice pointing his leather-gloved finger at the brutality of the planet. This abomination over there, at that travesty, at a symptom over here, at a horrific result beyond that burning building. This is the ride often taken with Alice, a man who is no stranger to social commentary, countless smash hits throughout the years delivering ironies, absurdities, and prescient fact. Look at "Eighteen," "Elected," "Only Women Bleed," "School's Out," "Billion Dollar Babies," "Poison," "Hey Stoopid," or "Lost In America" to name a few. He's always spoken to the people who will ultimately cause or prevent Brutal Planet. "I think sometimes it's my job to take the ironies in what I see coming and write about them," offers the tale-teller. "Because if I'm going to make somebody think about something, I want to exaggerate it to the point where it's so absurd or funny, but it also has its roots in reality. In other words, it's not so absurd that it can't happen."

And so begins this tale called "Brutal Planet," which really isn't so much a tale as a collection of nasty vignettes; or as Alice puts it, "Each track is a little moment on Brutal Planet. It gives you a snap shot of this future environment." There are eleven snapshots in all, hardly enough to provide all the answers, but enough to fuel that uneasy feeling of hopelessness. "I'm an optimist but Alice is the ultimate pessimist," according to rock's perennial schizo.

Each perceptive, often harsh, futuristic music track claws and pecks at doomful characteristics and characters of Brutal Planet, a summation of events that often start unassumingly, a testimony to chaos theory captured within the song "It's The Little Things." Alice explains: "That song is a personal one for me. It's about taking the little things and blowing them up. I've been in movie theaters where people talk all through the movie, where I was ready to turn around, and I didn't care if I was going to jail or not, I'm just going to break a chair over this guy's head. It's like road rage. Somebody beeps at you. Do you shoot them? We're at the point where we're all on a hair trigger."And so it starts small and it grows large, dark and eventually blindingly evil. "Pick Up The Bones" addresses greater horrors. Events that are almost surreal, yet ones that can be viewed on CNN.

"Bones" is about a guy I saw on the news that was collecting his family. He was going through the rubble, the aftermath of episode of destruction, literally picking up bones in a pillowcase so he could put them all to rest. Now that's horror."

This particular Alice album also points to the heartache of humanity, through brutality and sometimes even humor. As usual, the planet comes down to man and woman struggling to make sense of an accelerating and increasingly meaningless life context. "Take It Like A Woman" is the album's most poignant moment. It's talking about how things just didn't turn out the way she planned it. At the end you realize that she's already dead. But she took it like a woman, much to her credit. People always say, "Hey, take it like a man." Well, she was even better than that, she took it like a woman.

The other end of the spectrum of this scorched terrain is found in "Wicked Young Man." "He's the guy that this whole planet has spawned. He's the worst of the worst. The lyrics explain that he is so violent that the extremist brotherhoods won't even take him. He's the ultimate loner. The line, "It's not the games that I play, the movies I see, the music I dig, I'm just a wicked young man," kinda dispels the fact that these people who do all these horrible things get it from the arts. Some people are just vicious, born psychopathic, born sociopathic. The only way to survive in the Brutal Planet saga is to be like this guy and there are a lot of them out there."

Getting to the rotten core of Brutal Planet and it's ultimate demise is "Gimme." "Gimme this! Gimme that!" shouts out the selfish pounding chorus -- a definite theme of greed. Which in turn leads us to the opus of gluttony, with forceful, colorful and ultimately stomach-turning lyrics. "Eat Some More" is about the way we are just eating (and starving) ourselves right off the planet.

"And it's just gluttony for the sake of gluttony. There's no rhyme or reason to it and it's very destructive. Every one of these songs point to destruction. Our attitude as a species is ultimately very destructive."