Week Four: Authenticity vs. Performance

Alice Cooper’s take on rock n’ roll and his gender bending performances are particularly interesting to me. Auslander states, “Because the hippie counterculture sought to resist this separation of performer and audience in favor of an imagined social collective, rock musicians were constrained to perform in ways that stressed their identity with their audiences” (p. 13). I think this is interesting when it comes to Alice Cooper because of his decision to take on the role of Alice Cooper as a person and speaks about “Alice” in the third person in interviews. Coming from the counterculture, Alice Cooper resisted all norms of the separation of performer and persona by blurring the lines of his personal life, who he is as a person, and his stage performance as a fictional character in more way than one. By dressing in drag, Alice takes on one characters and speaks as an 18-year-old in “I’m Eighteen,” taking on a younger character’s appealing nature for the audience.

When speaking about Ocho, Auslander says, “Wearing the gold lame suit was clearly a theatrical gesture in conflict with a counterculture that was ambivalent, as best, about theatricality, especially in musical performances” (p. 10). Auslander goes on to states, “Alice Cooper was probably the first rock band of the 1960s to build their entire image around transvestism, intentionally confronting the rock audience with a visual practice -- and intimations of sexuality -- that preyed on its insecurities” (p. 33). I agree with this statement in that Alice Cooper took rock in a new direction by creating a theatricality in his music and making the performance something to be reckoned with. His performance was unique to the band and was something that had to be experienced in person, which I believe is something that trailed into glam rock in later years. From his exaggerated makeup to his use of women’s clothing and props, Alice Cooper toyed with the concept of his gender and heterosexuality. This theatricality was not something that the counterculture found appealing, which ultimately led to a new emergence of music for the next generation and a way for young people to find their own place among music when they didn’t fit in with the counterculture.