Parish wrote: ↑Tue Jun 27, 2023 5:15 pm
My point which I stumble over sometimes is that the actual songwriting (for me) isnt as good as when the ACG were doing it. Naturally there are great songs sprinkled here and there on his solo records but for the most part
they fall short of the legacy stuff. I LOVE Dada, From The Inside, Flush The Fashion, Brutal Planet but they arent in constant rotation like LITD, Killer, School's Out, B$B and MOL are...these records mean more to me as I was first experiencing them during the sweet spot of my teenage years.
With those original albums it was very much a case of 'lightning in a bottle'. The right people at the right time in the place and climate.
It will NEVER happen again in the same way, even if you could get everyone involved back in the same room. An attempt to recreate that would almost certainly fail as unavoidably it ISN'T the same people (no one is the same person they were at 20years old), nor the same time or climate.
When considering any solo album I consciously put those ACG albums (in fact all the 70s albums) to one side. It's pointless to compare them. The 'baggage' of familiarity, memories and nostalgia that comes with them is immense. Nothing released later can really come that close.
However for other fans that 'baggage' could well be attached to later albums. As CooperRocks basically said so much about music is how you FEEL about it and how it relates to you and the time you first heard it. The problem with you is that you absolutely have to be the only one that is right, and you insult anyone who has different opinions. It serves no purpose at all other than to piss people off.
Interestingly when you say the songwriting isn't as good as it was on those albums, I think many professional songwriters would disagree. Most of his more recent material are very well written songs, from a technical point of view. I think what makes the early albums stand out was the that they didn't really KNOW, or just ignored, the standard rules of how to write a song, and so you got something far more interesting and original as a result. No other artist truly sounds like the original Alice Cooper, because they had no barriers or pre-conceived ideas on what a song should be, and treated movie soundtracks and pop singles as the equally valid influences, mixing it all together.
So many bands, as they grow older, claim they write better songs then they ever did in the early years, and yet it's the earlier material that stands the test of time better. Many classic bands become more 'mainstream' as the years pass but almost always it's the earlier songs that are fan favourites. It's almost impossible for any bad to better their classic period.