ALICE COOPER: 'You Cannot Shock An Audience Anymore'

September 8, 2006

Sara Farr of The Paramus Post reports:

Alice Cooper is the father of shock rock and he's talking about how things used to be when he started performing his bizarre stage show for audiences back in the late 1960s.

"Fantasy used to be a lot more effective than reality," said Alice Cooper, speaking via telephone.

Now "you cannot shock an audience anymore. Audiences are shocked - and I'm shocked — by CNN. When you're seeing a real guy getting his real head cut off by real terrorists on television, and then you see Alice Cooper get his head cut off in a guillotine that's an obvious trick, well, it's not very shocking."

Strong words from the guy who once threw a chicken into an audience, thinking it could fly away. When the audience ripped the chicken apart, the reputation of the man born Vincent Damon Furnier in Detroit was cemented in the mind of middle-class America, which, according to a 1972 article in New Musical Express, "branded him a pervert." (Ozzy Osbourne, whose own poultry incident is another piece of legendary rock lore, is a friend of Cooper's.)

"My reputation's been going for 40 years now. They know that the guillotine is coming," continued Cooper. "Back then, they didn't know it was coming, so it was easy to shock an audience."

Read the rest of the article at www.paramuspost.com.

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