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It's that much worse when the horror-rocker's grimmest predictions start to become reality, as they have with his new album Dragontown.
"It's turned out to be a strangely timely album," The Coop, 53, says during a recent phone chat to promote the disc.
"I wrote this before Sept. 11. I was talking about what might happen 30 or 40 years from now. Then, a couple of months later, there it was."
Dragontown doesn't so much mirror current events as present what could be interpreted loosely as a moralistic impression of them. Typical Alice fare on the surface, the album is set in a sort of post-apocalyptic purgatory where characters pay in blood for choices they've made in life.
Moral choices
Cooper compares it to Dante's Inferno, "a place where people have to deal not with political choices but moral choices. People might say that sounds pretty Christian, but let's pretend we don't believe in anything. If you want to look at it that way, it's as fictitious as The Wizard Of Oz. But if you have any of those beliefs, you have to deal with your conscience."
Dragontown was originally conceived as a part-two to Cooper's 2000 album Brutal Planet, which was a typically gory indictment of a real world that was far worse than any comic book fantasy he could imagine for the stage.
"I was at a point where I was saying, 'What scares me?' " Cooper says. "What's under the bed doesn't scare me anymore. What's in the closet doesn't scare me. You can deal with the Freddy Kruegers of the world, but can you deal with CNN? Reality is always much more frightening because you can't just brush it off."
The singer adds that while his blood 'n' guts live shows were at one time seen as offensive and controversial, they were always meant as an escape from a harsher reality.
Part of the problem with the western world, he says, is that people often can't understand the difference.
"When I did Brutal Planet I was trying to open people's eyes that we're very insulated in America, and in Canada," he says. "There are 72 wars going on in the world right now, and we're only aware of one of them. If it doesn't happen in Philadelphia or St. Louis or Buffalo or L.A. or Detroit, it never happened. Until it touches our shores, we're very unaware of it. One of the biggest monsters on this planet is apathy. If 400,000 people died in a machete attack in Toronto, would there ever be any end to that story?"
Of course, there's the possibility that a nation waking up to a world of turmoil would still prefer the old make-believe Alice.
"I don't think that Alice Cooper at this point is going to write teenage angst ditties," he says. "I'm Eighteen and School's Out and Elected were valid at the time. Now I don't think it would be fair for Alice or Ozzie or Aerosmith to write teenage angst songs. I like to think that as a bit of an elder statesman of rock 'n' roll I can sit back and look at the whole thing. A lot of my views are cynical. But there's still some humour -- there has to be."
Cooper recently finished tours of Australia, Europe, and the U.S. He'll head back out in the spring, possibly for a cross-Canada tour.
And fear not: His new worldview hasn't dampened his schtick.
"I'm not the only one who gets my head cut off in this show," he says, laughing. "Let's put it this way: We give a whole new meaning to Britney being topless."