“Nobody would ever say that now”: the awkward lyric Alice Cooper would not write today
Despite the shock rock legacy, there’s little among Alice Cooper’s heyday songbook that’s truly controversial in the 2020s.
Any pearl-clutching and twisted knickers among America’s stuffy conservatives were always destined to age like milk. The fact is, ‘Coop’ just wasn’t political enough to ever wade into material that could truly unleash subversion or unveil the era’s social hobgoblins. The former psychedelic straggler turned hard rock snake summoner’s business was in firmly, unwavering apolitical theatre, flashing a little satire on his ‘Elected’ campaign lampoon, and casting himself as the condemned to his on-stage executions every headline show.
It was enough to rattle cages and rub the UK’s censorious Mary Whitehouse the wrong way when he graced British television during glam’s peak, but Cooper was about Grand Guignol escapism and gleeful irreverence over seething attacks on the Stars and Stripes. He was too much of a proud American and budding Christian. Rather than an explicit political snarl, the band instead penned songs that tapped into a more universal sense of street-level or suburban, everyday rebellion.
It’d serve him well. When dreaming up his defining hit, Cooper would harken back to the childhood constant of waiting for that school bell to ring out and herald the arrival of a glorious summer break away from classrooms, teachers, and homework. Thrown in some anti-establishment lyrical fodder, and the band held a surefire hit of anarchic energy ready to be unleashed on the 1970s pop charts.
Released ahead of its namesake album, 1972’s ‘School’s Out’ flexes a glam masterclass of liberatory chaos, Glen Buxton’s hacking riff soundtracking the feral laws of the playground jungle, as Cooper announces school isn’t just “out for summer”, but indeed is over “forever”, and like music to every kids ears, has “been blown to pieces.” While arguably harmless in its cartoon destruction, ‘School’s Out’s comic lyrics have raised an eyebrow from the original drummer and co-writer.
“I have thought about that a lot of times,” Neal Smith told Sonic Perspectives in 2020. “The lyrics ‘School’s been blown to pieces’ is obviously a time capsule of the early ‘70s. Nobody would ever say that now. … I’m sure some places would take certain lines out of the song before playing.”
“I would never write a song like that now,” Smith added. “I live a few miles from Newtown, Connecticut, where the tragedy at the elementary school happened. I would never say something that could be catastrophic to a school.”
There’s no doubt that the Cooper band only intended some glitter hard rock fun with ‘School’s Out’ lyrical goad of schoolyard destruction, but such sentiments have become mired by a darker development in contemporary America, plagued by school shootings, including Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School and the scores of incidents before and after.
It’s a reality that the UK never quite had to grapple with, able to embrace its rebuke of classroom claustrophobia and shoot ‘School’s Out’ to the top of the UK Singles Chart, assuring Cooper a standing in the nation’s glam affections to this day.
