Is Alice Cooper Considered A Goth?

I believe him to be something of the father of the goth style and subculture. But my dad, being a huge fan of Alice and hater of goths believes he is someting else.
Of course when I ask him what he would be classified as he says "he's just Alice, he doesn't need a label.

 

Your father is correct.

 

Never heard of him.

 

Well then my disobediant child, your life has yet to be changed, your mind enlightened and your socks thoroughly rocked off.

 

Yeah, and Robert Smith is emo.

 

Course it just depends on whose definition. If I describe a music as goth, I'm usually meaning gothic rock at least, whatever wave . . . I don't really describe people that way, unless we're talking Germanic tribes.

 

The makeup, the clothes, the macabre content of his music and live performances, it doesn't get more gothic than that. He makes Tim Burton and Jhonen Vasquez seem like normal mainstream people.
Sure, when he first came out in the 70's he was one of the first people who dressed and acted like that. But by the eighties the goth culture had been formed and I believe he had a hand in starting that.

 

Yeah turn to Robert Smith. Besides, Tim Burton and Jhonen Vasquez aren't musicians, one is a dark film maker and the other is a comic artist. Neither are goths despite their works being favoured by goths.

 

I hope you're the only person who missed the intent of my message.

 

No I just wanted to say that. I get that it was supposed to be a silly little joke.

 

LOL.....

 

Ah yes, how ignorant I was in my youth (one year ago). I never actually hated him it was just that my father kept playing it over and over and over again.
That's really creepy that you remember so much about me. People on this site still know what I look like, how old I am and where I live evn though I took all that information down ages ago. Cops are still after me, should not leave clues unless I am the Riddler.

 

This is why I'm going to school to be a librarian... my brain is a friggin' card catalog.

 

Man, I wish I could delete all the old posts I had here earlier. And it seems like ones from even a year ago I can end up hating as well. Hell, give me a week and I can regret posting this response . . . At least if you wait long enough, things get locked and forgotten, eh? There's something then.

 

Seriously. Or all the times I should have flamed someone even though I would have gotten banned, and didn't. Those are the times I regret.

 

Yes, it does. That look isn't really goth.

No, he didn't. The deep roots of goth culture are with Bowie and with the Velvet Underground. More immediately, it came out of the punk scene, with a touch of glam. Alice Cooper was not at all involved in the formation of the goth scene.

Alice Cooper is much more campy, and much more tied to American rock-and-roll in a more populist kind of way, as opposed to the much more artsy/avant-garde goth scene. Alice Cooper is more tied to heavy metal, and goth is descended from glam and punk.

It's kind of like this:

Alice Cooper -> Kiss -> Motley Crue
-> Marilyn Manson


Velvets -> Bowie -> Bauhaus \ Gothic
-> Stooges -> Joy Division / Rock

Totally unconnected in all but the most superficial and irrelevant ways.

 

English, please.

 

I agree with Dizfactor's summarization. At least, until the comparison charts came up. (No way in Hades do I even lump in Motley Crue with the Cooper style. Hair Metal, of the 80's period, was certainly more of an extreme application of the Glam style. If anything, I'd say the Cooper style has more indirectly influenced what is now the "Corpsepaint" style of Black Metal.)

 

Sorry, the formatting got totally boned on that one.

Alice Cooper begat Kiss, who in turn begat Motley Crue and the hair bands of the 80s. Marilyn Manson also drew mostly on Alice Cooper and Kiss as inspirations, as did, come to think of it, White Zombie and Monster Magnet. You could throw in some Zep and Sabbath, and eventually the new wave of British heavy metal (Iron Maiden, et al). That's one lineage.

In an almost entirely unrelated lineage, the Velvet Underground and the Warhol scene influenced David Bowie, who morphed under their influence from a folkie/rock guy into Ziggy Stardust. That set off glam, which had a back-and-forth relationship with early punk (the New York Dolls, Blondie, etc), which in turn also had a relationship with the art world, the avant-garde, and the queer and fetish underground scenes and certain drug scenes (amphetamines and heroin especially). All of those influences coalesced into early goth, which combined the avant-garde aspirations of the Velvets, the decadent and androgynous performance aspects of glam, and some of the sound and a lot of the following of punk into what became goth.

To put it even more simply, none of the bands that were responsible for the birth of goth, most especially Joy Division and Bauhaus, but also early Cure, Siouxsie, etc, were at all interested in or fans of Alice Cooper, and none of the people who did listen to Alice Cooper had any involvement in the goth scene whatsoever.

Oh, come on. Shout at the Devil era Crue?

Sort of. It was more like an appropriation of some of the trappings of glam by the metal world.

The two main threads of electric-guitar-based music in the 70s and 80s were punk and metal. Glam belongs on the punk side of the ledger, but hair metal basically stole glam style and used it for its own purposes. The big difference between the two is the total lack of sexual ambiguity in hair metal. Glam was all about sly nudges and winks in the direction of queer subtext and androgeny. Hair metal bands were loud and proud heterosexuals, and never made even the slightest gestures in the direction of homoeroticism or gender ambiguity. They were red-blooded straight guys with hot chicks in bikinis on their sports cars who happened to use a lot of hairspray and wear garish clothing, whereas glam kind of played on the sort of gay cabaret/drag queen vibe.

Hmm. I could see that, I suppose. I don't really know enough about the origins of corpsepaint to know for sure one way or the other, but it sounds plausible.

In any case, black metal is a good example of basically the same parallel. Yes, both corpsepaint-wearing black metal fans and goths tend to favor makeup and similar color schemes and "dark" aesthetics, but the two scenes have absolutely nothing to do with each other in terms of their history and have seldom had much crossover in terms of audience.

Similarly, yes, Alice Cooper and goths both wear black makeup, but that's a really superficial similarity that misleads some people into thinking the two are related, when they're really not.

 

It seems style is something of interpretation. But there is some fact to it too, as Dizfactor has proven.

 

Sorry, Dizfactor, but even with "Shout at the Devil"-era Crue, I still never considered them more than just hyped-up Glam Metallers. (Must've been all the Aquanet and still somewhat feminized make-up stylings.) But you more than have my admiration for knowing just what you're talking about with musical style history!

 

This thread makes me sad. Kids these days.

 

Alice is in lack of a better word, theatrical. I'd give him credit with being one of the frontrunners of glam rock, though.

 

QFT.

Saw him live about a year and a half ago, and he was great.

 

Corpsepaint evolved out of Alice Cooper's and Kiss' style; though BM musicians are loathe to admit it.

As for the crossover thing, there is one band that tried to bridge the gap, and (in the eyes of "true" BMers) failed dismally; yet (in the eyes of mainstream goths) succeeded brilliantly.

Cradle of Filth.

Makes me wish they'd never tried.