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Alice and the Monsters

Grand Guignol and Rock: Alice Cooper's Money Machine

Photographs by Santi Visalli

The "tranvestment" can be the symptom of a disease, the schizoid necessity of doubling the personality, the violent assertion of a right to disputed homosexuality, even an indirect but demystifying form of social revolt. Or all these things together. Sometimes, instead, the "tranvestment" is an industry, a sure investment of assets, an economic operation worthy of a great manager. This is the case of the Alice Cooper disguise, disguised and ambiguous even in the decidedly feminine name, which has thus reached its own personal "wonderland", made up of three million sold of its last record, of two billion lire collected with the last show, which is also coming to Europe and Italy. Alice Cooper is therefore not only a rock singer, he is not just a fashion phenomenon, he is a man (so to speak) of genius. His disguise, together with the small, ancient scenic devices, based on sex and violence, and revived by the surrealistic and somewhat ideologically cialtrone fantasy of Salvador Dali, are a dollar-machine of colossal proportions and capacities. Thus homosexuality becomes an accessory: what matters are the external, visible elements, the heavy make-up, the feminine hairstyles, the deviant phallic symbols that invade the scene. It's a fantasy from Grand Guignol: mannequins gutted and torn to pieces, "fairies" raped, macabre songs (the most applauded is a rock significantly entitled "I love the dead"). As in a colossal publicity companion, every single gesture, customary costume, every movement in Cooper's show is calculated with the percussion of an electronic brain, to obtain the desired effect. A safe, precise, mathematical effect, with nothing magical, mysterious, miraculous. An avalanche of money, rightly, laboriously earned, with an authentic job, halfway between art and the "trade", the profession understood in the highest sense of the term.

(Translated to English from the Italian language publication, 2019)