I liked Alice Cooper better when he bit the heads off chickens.

         You remember Alice Cooper, don't you? Alice Cooper, né Vincent Furnier, the 56-year-old fellow who used to be a rock & roll star, but who has more recently achieved distinction for his willingness to golf with former Republican presidents and attend NBA games with Republican Senators. That Alice Cooper. The one who recently acted as the worst kind of shill for said Republicans, and cynically sneered about the efforts of Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M. and John Mellencamp to fundraise for efforts to unseat US President George W. Bush.

         "To me, that's treason. I call it treason against rock & roll because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics," card-carrying Republican Alice told the Canadian Press, with a straight face, prior to launching a 15-city Canadian tour in Thunder Bay.

         Quoth Alice: "When I was a kid and my parents started talking about politics, I'd run to my room and put on the Rolling Stones as loud as I could. So when I see all these rock stars up there talking politics, it makes me sick... If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night, and very rarely do we sit around reading The Washington Journal ."

         Ho ho ho. That Alice: he sure knows his way around a quote, doesn't he? Alice's pithy little rejoinder got a lot of play in newspapers across North America, and it certainly caught my attention, too.

         When I first read what Alice said to Canadian Press, I wanted to do to him what he used to allegedly do to chickens. (He didn't actually ever deliberately kill a chicken, by the way: three decades ago, at a show out West, he threw one into an audience, mistakenly thinking that chickens could fly, and the fans promptly tore the bird to pieces.) But I restrained myself. After all, Alice - even if he is a self-described moron - had raised a legitimate issue: should rock & rollers like Messrs. Springsteen, Stipe and Mellencamp ever comment on politics?

         There was a time when I too thought they shouldn't. After all, I reasoned, rock stars have a tremendous ability to sway young minds - so, therefore, isn't it better that kids learn about important political choices in the traditional ways (reading newspapers, watching TV, falling asleep in Social Studies classes)? Should coke-addled, pot-bellied, self-indulgent hedonistic rockers be permitted to pass along their ideological biases to millions of impressionable teenagers?

         For quite some time, and just like Alice Cooper, my answer to that question was no. And then I heard the first Clash album, circa 1977 or so. And then I read what British kids had to say about the first Clash album.

         It was raw, it was loud, and it was fiercely political - about things that were largely beyond my ken, like Britain's system of "the dole," and police brutality, and race riots. But here's the thing: the Brit fans adored that LP, and not simply for its sound. They loved it, they said, BECAUSE IT WAS MUSIC THAT WASN'T AFRAID TO URGE KIDS TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

         There: I wrote that last part in capital letters to ensure that not even Alice Cooper could miss the point - to wit, that rock & roll matters, and not simply because it's fun to dance to.

         In recent months, I've been interviewing assorted rock stars about politics for a book I'm writing and, occasionally, for the magazine you now grasp in your hands. The musicians, morons that they are, have had some very insightful insights to pass along.

         Like Joey S**thead, frontman of legendary Vancouver punk outfit DOA: "You have a vast majority of entertainers who just want to entertain. There is a much smaller group who want to entertain and say something at the same time. Some people come to get drunk, some come to hear a message. Both are legitimate."

         Like Tom Delonge of Blink 182: "When I was growing up, I was listening to Bad Religion. And when they'd make references to politics, or even Greek mythology, I was such a huge Bad Religion fan that I would look these things up that I didn't understand. I would do research into these things. And without Bad Religion, I would have probably never learned about a lot of those things on my own."

         Like Jim Lindberg of Pennywise: "I'm constantly amazed when I talk to people who have the opinion that it doesn't matter if you don't vote. That kind of attitude is hurting us. We need to get past that, and that's why a lot of bands are putting more politics in their music."

         Like Jake Burns of Stiff Little Fingers: "You can do things to make your life better - that is what The Clash were putting forward, and that appealed to me. Particularly since I was growing up in Northern Ireland and it didn't seem like there was anything that could make our lives better. And that really impressed the hell out of me."

         That last one, perhaps, is the best rebuttal of the calculating old cynic named Alice Cooper - namely, that a kid growing up in a place as bleak and as soul-destroying as Northern Ireland was given some hope by a political song and a desire to make things better.

         That's not being a moron, Alice. That's being smart. That's evidence that rock & roll can change people's lives in a demonstrably good way.

         "Moronic," I'd say, is best defined as any aging rock star who is willing to campaign for George W. Bush, and then turn around and attack rock stars who campaign for his Democratic opponents.

         Um, like you do.

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