The famous rocker also finds ‘the whole woke thing’ to be ‘laughable.’
There has always been a bit more to Alice Cooper than meets the eye. Much of his music is snarling (“I’m Eighteen”) and rebellious (“No More Mr. Nice Guy”); much of his live act, shocking and outrageous. But not far beneath the surface is an easygoing erudition, memorably captured in Wayne’s World and displayed on his radio show. And while he once plumbed depths of depravity familiar to rock stars, he managed to escape those depths, a fact for which he credits his wife and his Christian faith: “I grew up in the church, went as far away as I could from it — almost died — and then came back to the church.” Now, he helps other celebrities get clean. He’s been married to the same woman since 1976, excepting a short separation in the mid ’80s before he turned his personal life around (at her behest) and they reconciled.
In an interview with music website Stereogum prompted by the release of his latest album, Cooper provides further depth to his character. He discusses, among other things, his high-school distance-running prowess (of particular interest to me), babysitting a young Keanu Reeves, meeting Salvador Dalí and other notables, and more. Most striking, however, are his comments on transgenderism and wokeism. On the former, he backs off more permissive comments about sexuality that he had made in the ’70s.
I’m understanding that there are cases of transgender, but I’m afraid that it’s also a fad, and I’m afraid there’s a lot of people claiming to be this just because they want to be that. I find it wrong when you’ve got a six-year-old kid who has no idea. He just wants to play, and you’re confusing him telling him, “Yeah, you’re a boy, but you could be a girl if you want to be.”
I think that’s so confusing to a kid. It’s even confusing to a teenager. You’re still trying to find your identity, and yet here’s this thing going on, saying, “Yeah, but you can be anything you want. You can be a cat if you want to be.” I mean, if you identify as a tree . . . And I’m going, “Come on! What are we in, a Kurt Vonnegut novel?” It’s so absurd, that it’s gone now to the point of absurdity.
He continues:
Everybody I talk to says, “Isn’t it stupid?” And I’m going, “Well, I respect people. I respect people and who they are, but I’m not going to tell a seven-year-old boy, ‘Go put a dress on because maybe you’re a girl,’ and he’s going, ‘No, I’m not. I’m a boy.’”
So I say let somebody at least become sexually aware of who they are before they start thinking about if they’re a boy or a girl. A lot of times, I look at it this way, the logical way: If you have these genitals, you’re a boy. If you have those genitals, you’re a girl. There’s a difference between “I am a male who is a female, or I’m a female that’s a male” and wanting to be a female. You were born a male. Okay, so that’s a fact. You have these things here.
Now, the difference is you want to be a female. Okay, that’s something you can do later on if you want to. But you’re not a male born a female.
Prompted by his interviewer’s suggestion that parents aren’t encouraging doubt in their kids but just listening to them, Cooper retorts:
Well, I can see somebody really taking advantage of this, though. A guy can walk into a woman’s bathroom at any time and just say, “I just feel like I’m a woman today” and have the time of his life in there, and he’s not in the least bit . . . He’s just taking advantage of that situation. Well, that’s going to happen. Somebody’s going to get raped, and the guy’s going to say, “Well, I felt like a girl that day, and then I felt like a guy.” Where do you draw this line?
About wokeness — i.e., the knife-edge vanguard forcing more of public life to reflect its ever-evolving niche left-wing preferences — more generally, Cooper is similarly blunt and logical:
The whole woke thing . . . Nobody can answer this question. Maybe you can. Who’s making the rules? Is there a building somewhere in New York where people sit down every day and say, “Okay, we can’t say ‘mother’ now. We have to say ‘birthing person.’ Get that out on the wire right now”? Who is this person that’s making these rules? I don’t get it. I’m not being old school about it. I’m being logical about it.
It’s getting to the point now where it’s laughable. If anybody was trying to make a point on this thing, they turned it into a huge comedy. I don’t know one person that agrees with the woke thing. I don’t know one person.
Obviously, politics are a poor litmus test for one’s approbation of artists or their art. If that were the case, practically entire fields of human endeavor would be off limits to my enjoyment; I assure you, they are not. Still, it is refreshing to find someone of Cooper’s caliber and stature expressing sense about some of the most nonsensical currents of modern life. It would be great if there were more. But it’s nice to have Alice Cooper.