Alice Cooper released Hey Stoopid in 1991 and this album along with Welcome To My Nightmare are the two quintessential Alice albums. Well, for me atleast! I consider this album to be a classic, although I am surprised that it didn’t do as well as I used to think. But most hardcore Alice Cooper fans think that Hey Stoopid had better songs than his 1989 smash hit Trash. The album has guest performances from guitar gods Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Vinnie Moore & Slash and also Nikki Sixx & Mick Mars from Motley Crue. Lyrical themes involve strictly drug use/addiction and love/sex. The opening track & title song, Hey Stoopid, is about dumb people who contemplate suicide or a druggie who thinks that narcotics is the answer. The emphasis on ‘Stoopid’ is to show how dumb the singer thinks the two characters are.
Love’s A Loaded Gun is about taking revenge against a cheating lover, with a really cool chorus and some killer guitars. The implication is about killing the cheating woman & the guy she is sneaking out to see; having watched unseen from afar, the protagonist, shoots both of them. Snakebite is about sex and sleeze Alice style. Burning Our Bed is a song about a broken relationship. Dangerous Tonight is a song about sex, or like I would put it, the deflowering of a virgin. My favourite song on the track, lyrics wise, is the ballad Might As Well Be On Mars about estranged lovers and a man pinning for his former lover, but who has moved on in her life, that the guy might as well be on another planet.
Feed My Frankenstein is the most well known of the songs, the video having been heavily promoted on MTV & Alice singing the song in the film Wayne’s World and it being included in the soundtrack album. It features a hot, molten guitar solo from Satriani. This is another favourite Cooper track for many. Hurricane Years is about wild times. Another song about sex & love is Little By Little, while Die For You is a wonderful track about lost love and how the singer would have given up everything for the love of the woman. The sleeze returns in the form of Dirty Deeds, while the autistic character/ alter ego ‘Steven’ in the album closer Wind Up Toy, who appears in an Alice song after a 15 year gap. “Daddy won’t discuss me, oh what a pain I must be, Mommy couldn’t stand having such a wind up boy, doctors want to check me, Poke me and dissect me, What do they expect? Feelings from a wound-up toy?”
With such a collection of great heavy rock tunes, I would have have expected it to be a huge hit but I consider it a classic. Here’s Hey Stoopid.