Alice Cooper Thinks a Lot of Pop Acts Copy Him

No matter how shocking they might be, once an artist achieves enough success, they'll eventually be absorbed into the mainstream -- and so it is with Alice Cooper, who surveys the current crop of pop acts and sees versions of himself in action.

"You go look at Shakira, Rihanna, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga -- they’re doing Alice Cooper," Cooper told Music Radar. "That’s what we were doing in the late '60s and early '70s through to now."

Not that female pop stars are alone in Cooper's view. "When Marilyn Manson came out I said, ‘OK, let me see: a guy with make-up on with a girl’s name who does theatrics -- I wish I’d thought of that. Marilyn and I are good friends now -- we’ve toured together. If you look at his show, it’s nothing like my show -- he has his own style of grotesque," he laughed. "Rob Zombie does a really good show, Marilyn does a great show. Gwar and Rammstein -- it’s all derivative of what we started doing. But the Alice show is still different."

And what makes him different? "You focus on Alice as the main character, so we don’t use pyro and things like that," Cooper pointed out. "I want the audience to get sucked in by the character because everything happens either to him or because of him."