Consumer Guide Album

Alice Cooper: Welcome to My Nightmare [Atlantic, 1975]
The solo debut actually ain't so bad--no worse than all the others. "Department of Youth" is his catchiest teen power song to date, "Cold Ethyl" his catchiest necrophilia song to date, and "Only Women Bleed" the most explicitly feminist song to hit top forty since "I Am Woman." Alice's nose for what the kids want to hear is as discriminating as it is impervious to moral suasion, so perhaps this means that the more obvious feminist truisms have become conventional wisdom among at least half our adolescents. Encouraging. B-