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Album Details

• Artist: Alice Cooper
• Album: Hey Stoopid
• Label: Sony
• Year of Release: 1991
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: gwhill on 2013-01-21

This album showcases a metal perpective on the classic Cooper sound and also shows prog tendencies in several places. Alice is joined on this album by many musicians, including several very notable guests (Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Ozzy Osbourne and others). It’s quite an extravaganza.

The disc opens with the title track, and that tune alone includes Joe Satriani, Slash and Ozzy Osborne as guests. The piece is potent and quite catchy, and puts forth an anti drug message. "If you stick a needle in your arm / You bite the dust, you buy the farm." Other songs with notable guest performers include “Burning Our Bed.” Somewhat along the lines of “Only Women Bleed,” the cut is a balladic rocker and another to feature Satriani. Satriani is also on “Feed My Frankenstein,” but joined by Nikki Sixx and Steve Vai. It’s a hard rocker that’s just a lot of fun. Vinnie Moore guests on the straightforward rocker “Hurricane Years.” Satriani also plays on “Little by Little,” which is basically a metal cut with a solid hook.

Featuring Mick Mars, “Die for You” is a potent arena rock ballad. Interestingly, the track that follows it feels more like Motley Crue than “Die for You” did, though. It’s the stomper “Dirty Dreams” and has a guest appearance from Vinnie Moore. The final cut on the disc, “Wind-Up Toy” is another that features Satriani. It’s an intriguing cut all by itself. Starting with twisted childlike music, the number then becomes quite spooky for a time before settling into a metallic hard rock format. The tune seems to combine the classic Cooper creepy style with a modern metal approach. This one makes very effective usage of occasional dissonance to lend a haunting tone, and the ending segment has a very eerie texture featuring strangely produced spoken word segments and a reference to Welcome To My Nightmare’s Steven.

The rest of the disc is made up of the moody, balladic number, “Love’s a Loaded Gun,” the straightforward metallic rocker “Snakebite,” a metal tune called “Dangerous Tonight” and what might be the most impressive tune of the set, the balladic rocker with prog stylings entitled “Might As Well Be on Mars.” All in all, Hey Stoopid clearly gets a lot of attention because of all the guests. The truth is, it delivers pretty well, even disregarding that attraction. It does fall more into the metallic side of Cooper’s catalog, but there are plenty of classic Cooper links there, too. It’s a very strong release.

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