Alice Cooper: "I'm Eighteen"

Enjoy your Wednesday fill of guest blogger Juke Box Hero!

It had been a while since I last e-strolled the Rolling Stone "500 Greatest Songs of All Time," so Brittany’s reference in her ode to Pink/Mercury yesterday inspired a return visit. Starting from the back, I was slightly yet immediately unnerved. Coming in at #494 is R. Kelly’s "Ignition," narrowly defeating the Stones’ juicy "Brown Sugar" (#495) and Weezer’s hip anthem "Buddy Holly" (#499).

Now obviously Mick, Keith, Rivers, and their respective gangs get more love further up the list, but really? R. Kelly? A "500 Most Epic Fails" list, certainly, but what is there to like about the cheesy elevator music backgrounds and an utter lack of any lyrical or musical creativity – other than those cuddly Duke undernerds whose music video cover became a YouTube sensation back before Facebook had even left the Ivies?

But I digress. We’re here to talk about songs worth listening to, YouTubes worth watching. Like some creepy, kooky, scintillating Alice Cooper. Their (because then it was the band’s name, not just the adopted moniker of Vincent Furnier – interesting trivia, eh? Thanks, Wikipedia) 1971 release "I’m Eighteen" gets on the RS board at a pretty underrated #487.

No matter what kind of adolescence you actually had (mine was relatively anger-free, which I often cite as the leading reason I’ll never be a good rock musician), this song embodies the general youth experience so perfectly: the awkwardness, the insecurity, the raw manifestations of mental and sexual maturity coalescing and superseding one another… It’s chaos and it’s poetry: 'I gotta get outta this place/I go running in outer space.' We’ve all been on those runs.

But for Alice, it’s controlled chaos. They don’t take time for the song to develop; they rock at will, spilling a searing guitar solo from the opening gates and rocking keyboards that somehow find the magical musical balance of being tight yet sounding loose. And though Cooper spends some time sitting onstage (I can’t blame him – those gold-glitter leggings and towering silver platforms would have Gaga drooling and the rest of us trying to find a more comfortable sitting position), all the sudden he gets up, albeit shakily, ascends to the band leader’s position, and reigns in his minions, deftly signaling the close of the anthem as if he were Bernstein tying up Beethoven. A master of his craft.

Whether or not the RS ranking is to be believed -- after all, Johnny Rotten himself chose this as his audition song for the Sex Pistols, and we all know where that got him -- "I’m Eighteen" survives as a punk-rock classicism: a seething declaration of dissatisfaction, futility (‘I get refused every day/Just don’t know what to say’), and ultimately preference for one’s current shitty surroundings (‘I’m 18 and I like it/I ain’t 21’). And it's delivered with more talent and musicianship than Rotten & Co. ever managed. Not that those guys cared. Pass the whiskey.