Thursday, June 21, 2007

297. Alice Cooper - Billion Dollar Babies (1973)
















Track Listing

1. Hello Hooray
2. Raped And Freezin'
3. Elected
4. Billion Dollar Babies
5. Unfinished Sweet
6. No More Mister Nice Guy
7. Generation Landslide
8. Sick Things
9. Mary Ann
10. I Love The Dead

Review

Alice Cooper, what a lovely man. Alice Cooper presents us with an interesting is not that good album here with Billion Dollar Babies. It is an American version of Glam which is really focusing in a gorier aspect of life. I have nothing against that per se and the best track in the whole album is I Love The Dead, a pretty disgusting necrophiliac lust song.

What I object to in Alice Cooper is the pedestrianity of the lyrics, the fact that what they are saying is shocking really doesn't cover for the fact that they are poorly written. The same already happened with Black Sabbath, but Sabbath had a sound which was much more distinctive than that of Alice Cooper.

Alice Cooper sounds like a mish-mash of Glam sounds, and that is what he is. He sounds a bit like Slade, a bit like Bowie even tries to sound a bit like Roxy Music by using some interesting effects on his music. He fails in all accounts, his music is never brilliant and his lyrics are always pedestrian. Some songs here are however worth the price of admission, see track highlights below for the ones you should download. So in the end it is not a wholly negative experience listening to the album, but it won't really get anywhere close to blowing your mind. Get it from Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights


1. I Love The Dead
2. Elected
3. Mary Ann
4. Unfinished sweet

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Billion Dollar Babies peaked at #1 on Billboard's Pop Albums chart. The single "Elected" peaked at #26 on the Pop Singles chart.

I actually remember seeing this clip when I was a kid, I must have been about 5 or 6... in the middle of the afternoon on Portuguese state television... those are the wonders of a country which had left a fascist regime 12 years earlier, freedom of the media is sometimes taken too far, so here's Alice Cooper with I Love The Dead:

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