Skip to main content

Art & Creativity Quote by Alice Cooper

"We started combining the use of light and the use of theatrics and the use of as many art forms as possible, and it's still growing - that's the whole idea of it"

About this Quote

Rock shows didn’t get bigger by accident; they got bigger because performers like Alice Cooper treated the stage like a battleground for attention. In that line, Cooper is basically sketching the blueprint of shock rock as a legitimate artistic method: don’t just play songs, build a world. Light, theatrics, and “as many art forms as possible” isn’t name-dropping production toys, it’s an argument that a concert can swallow cinema, theater, fashion, horror, and vaudeville and still feel like rock.

The subtext is defensive and ambitious at once. Cooper came up in an era when “serious” music culture prized authenticity as minimalism: stand there, play, mean it. His answer was to weaponize artifice. The guillotines, the makeup, the lighting cues aren’t distractions from the music; they’re a way to make the music unavoidable, to turn sound into an event you can’t replicate on a record. That’s why the phrasing “combining” matters: it’s collage logic, the same cultural impulse that built music videos, arena tours, and eventually today’s pop megashows.

Contextually, this lands as a statement about escalation. “It’s still growing” acknowledges that spectacle has an arms race baked in: audiences acclimate, tech advances, and what once scandalized becomes standard production grammar. Cooper’s “whole idea” is less about shock for shock’s sake than about evolution - rock as a multimedia machine that survives by mutating, staying one step ahead of boredom.

Quote Details

TopicMusic
SourceHelp us find the source
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Cooper, Alice. (2026, January 17). We started combining the use of light and the use of theatrics and the use of as many art forms as possible, and it's still growing - that's the whole idea of it. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-started-combining-the-use-of-light-and-the-use-37772/

Chicago Style
Cooper, Alice. "We started combining the use of light and the use of theatrics and the use of as many art forms as possible, and it's still growing - that's the whole idea of it." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-started-combining-the-use-of-light-and-the-use-37772/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We started combining the use of light and the use of theatrics and the use of as many art forms as possible, and it's still growing - that's the whole idea of it." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-started-combining-the-use-of-light-and-the-use-37772/. Accessed 22 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Alice Add to List
Alice Cooper on music, spectacle, and evolving theater
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper (born February 4, 1948) is a Musician from USA.

29 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, Politician
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton