10 best alternate personas from classic artists

For most people, this entry almost feels like cheating. Alice Cooper is already one of the biggest figures in shock rock, and despite him not actually dying at the end of every one of his shows, he always lived up to his name as one of the great crypt keepers of the genre. While all of that is absolutely true, the myth behind Cooper has made fans forget that that wasn’t what the plan was for him starting out.

Despite always wanting to shock people a little more than The Rolling Stones did, Vincent Furnier intended to go by his original moniker and have the band play music with a demented-sounding name behind it. As soon as he adopted his habits of maiming baby dolls onstage and getting beheaded during every show, though, Cooper seemed to overpower his creator in a lot of ways, leading to him blacking out half the time that he played and getting completely consumed by the alcohol.

While Cooper has thankfully been on the road to recovery for years at this point, he now understands that there are two different sides to himself. Both of them happen to be named Alice Cooper, but while one of them tears apart everything in sight when he gets onstage, the other one is a strong family man who manages to get a nice round of golf in before the night falls.

By the end of the 1990s, music had seemed more superficial than ever. The whole point behind grunge was supposed to be to stamp about anything inauthentic, and yet MTV persisted in trying to cram every single boy band and nu-metal act down everyone’s throat without so much as warning everyone about what they were going to witness. Although Damon Albarn was fine in his own band, Gorillaz gave him a chance for a new beginning all over again.

Since Blur was already on the rocks while making projects like 13, 2-D became Albarn’s unofficial character in the group. While the lion’s share of his duties revolved around him making a slightly offbeat version of what he was doing in Blur, the guy with two dents in his head led to him making songs he could have never done with his old band like the trip-hop inflexions on ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’ or bringing in De La Soul and MF Doom on Demon Days.

Although Gorillaz has grown to the point where they have their own written lore about them, it’s easy to hop in and out of that world as you please whenever you put on their record. Because despite being one of the biggest names in 1990s music, Albarn managed to overcome his Britpop tendencies once he started entering the digital world.

The Lizard King – Jim Morrison

If San Francisco was the one place to go for hippy idealism in the 1960s, The Doors were the other side of that coin. Jim Morrison was the definition of unpredictable whenever he got onstage, and any of their shows could have incited a riot, been an absolute mess, or been the greatest rock and roll performance of all time depending on which night they played. While Morrison did have a lot of nicknames throughout his career, ‘The Lizard King’ was only reserved for special appearances.

Then again, the version that Morrison inhabited onstage was never given a proper studio release. Though the name eventually turned up towards the end of ‘Not To Touch the Earth’, the original incarnation of that song was about Morrison transforming himself into an alternate persona where he would have a more chaotic vibe onstage and give in to all of his animalistic tendencies.

While that’s not all that different from what he would do on any normal day onstage, ‘The Lizard King’ was always the moment where Morrison channelled the same energy John Lennon did on ‘I Am The Walrus’. It may not have made that much sense at the time and might make even less sense now, but in the idyllic dreamscape that The Doors created onstage, ‘The Lizard King’ had the potential to show people the meaning of life.

Jo Calderone – Lady Gaga

Every single move Lady Gaga ever made was supposed to be a subtle comment on the music industry. Whether it was the way that people glamorise women in inappropriate ways or how people give in to their more hedonistic side of themselves, nothing was off the table when Gaga first started donning meat dresses and arriving at awards shows in giant eggs. For all of her massive stunts, though, one of her most interesting onstage moments came when she refused to show up.

Oh, the person born Stephanie Germonatta certainly showed up, but Jo Calderone was what the audience heard when she showed up at the MTV Awards. Despite performing a handful of songs that night, hearing Calderone be incredibly misogynistic, make crude remarks and generally act like he was one of the coolest things on Earth is one of the most ingenious moves that Gaga could have played.

Most people simply accept any musician’s right to act like a dickhead, but now that a woman was doing the same thing in a guy’s persona, suddenly people started to take notice of how gross they were being. Although Gaga has confirmed that Calderone is no longer among the living, he will forever be synonymous with one of the greatest gender-bending moves in the history of pop music.

Prince always seemed to have too much creative energy for one man. Given his stature, ‘The Purple One’ simply couldn’t carry all of that massive talent on his own, and that meant him giving some of the best tunes away to his friends, even managing to put together entire bands to record his songs. He may have saved his favourites for himself, but sometimes the range he was working with wasn’t suited for a male voice.

Although Prince could reach incredibly high notes, the tunes that he had to carry exclusively in falsetto were usually saved for Camille. Since he had already worked his magic for people like Chaka Khan and Morris Day and the Time, this was meant to be the feminine side of Prince’s personality, either being sung from the perspective of a woman or an excuse for him to tap into something a bit more androgynous than before.

Camille’s album never fully materialised as it should have, but it’s easy to find some of her tracks show up on Prince’s albums, including showing up on albums like Sign O’ The Times. It would be one thing for Prince to turn himself into his own personal hit factory, but being to have two distinct personas trapped in one body is practically a musical superpower compared to every other act on MTV.

As soon as grunge hit, it felt like U2’s brand of music was officially over. Bono had spent years crafting himself as the rock and roll Messiah who was going to save everyone from the superficial sides of the genre, and now that everyone had someone else in a flannel shirt for that job, the Irish juggernauts had started to look like yesterday’s news. The last thing they should have been doing was playing up their looks, which probably made Bono’s turn as ‘The Fly’ work so well.

The whole appeal of someone acting like a rockstar had begun looking lame, but whenever Bono donned the pancake makeup and massive glasses, everyone knew that he was playing the archetype for what a post-ironic musician should look like. No one expected anything this cerebral out of the band who made ‘With Or Without You’, but since they had songs like ‘Zoo Station’ and ‘Until The End of the World’ at their disposal, they were now being looked at as the next phase of rock and roll.

Even for someone who played up their nastiness, Bono still managed to give ‘The Fly’ a heart, especially when showing his vulnerable side on ‘One’ or ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’. Most people who don this look are far too self-absorbed to even care about what other people think, but Bono’s message was always that the life of a massive rockstar isn’t as glamorous as most people would expect.

Most people could understand that rap could get a bit more dangerous as the gangsta-rap era ended. The entire beef between the East and West coasts had already become deadly, and it wasn’t clear whether the next major power player in the game would end up surviving long enough to make that much of an impact. While Eminem certainly wasn’t what most people expected out of a major rap star at the time, what came out of his mouth as Slim Shady was every mother’s nightmare.

While Infinite was practically the breeding ground for Eminem, The Slim Shady LP introduced everyone to the massive schoolyard bully of hip-hop. Dr Dre may have looked like the baddest producer to ever step behind a mixing board, but whenever Slim was behind the mic, he was liable to say whatever he wanted, whether that was going after homosexuals, people who picked on him when he was in school, or shooting people because that happened to inconvenience him one day.

Even though a lot of what he said would be considered homophobic, ableist, and everything in between, there was always a certain playfulness when listening to ‘The Real Slim Shady’ back in 2001. No one thought that they were going to see him as a role model, but it’s hard to listen to him shoot a bank teller in the middle of the song ‘Criminal’ and not laugh at the black humour behind it all.

The Network – Green Day

Green Day were always children of the glory days of punk. They had their start in the punk underground that also birthed acts like Operation Ivy, but there was always an appreciation for people like Sex Pistols and Ramones in whatever they spat out in the 1990s. After punk comes new wave, though, and before they became rock and roll gods, Billie Joe Armstrong blew off steam by embracing his inner Mark Mothersbaugh.

Despite refusing to admit it, The Network was Green Day’s alter ego in the 2000s, created as an excuse for them to make the craziest synth-driven songs of their career. And if Warning was getting severe pushback from fans at the time, Money Money 2020 was enough to have them running scared, including songs that made absolutely no sense, like ‘X-Ray Hamburger ’, or involving a squelchy synthesiser solo on tracks like ‘Roshambo.’

This wasn’t the Green Day that we were used to, but it’s easy to find some of those trademark tendencies in there somewhere. They still sang about masturbation and being bored, and even if they would be doing another drastic tonal shift by making American Idiot, The Network is the alternate-dimension version of the band that would have formed had everyone realised that the next musical movement in the 1990s involved keyboards instead of guitars.

The Fireman – Paul McCartney

How does one hide when being the biggest musician in the world? It would be easy for someone to adopt another persona when they are starting out or learning the ropes as an artist, but for someone of Paul McCartney’s stature, it would have been a dead giveaway for anyone without clogged ears to recognise his voice on any record. Macca has had some wild pseudonyms over the years, though, and The Fireman is easily the most adventurous thing he has ever been a part of.

Teaming up with producer Youth, McCartney explored the kind of zany energy in the 2000s that he hadn’t visited since the days of McCartney II. While there had been a tried and true method to most of his greatest albums at that point, hearing him take the time to make electronic-tinged pop rock was a welcome breath of fresh air for fans, even selling well enough for him to perform songs like ‘Sing the Changes’ pretty regularly in his setlist.

Although albums like Twin Freaks might capture the danceable elements of his sound a bit better, something tells me we haven’t seen the last of The Fireman yet. Considering the robotic effects that McCartney put into Memory Almost Full and the electronic beats blaring throughout New, he still has a knack for getting weird, so perhaps he and Youth could get together to make one last masterpiece.

Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie

Really, was it much of a competition here? David Bowie was the ultimate archetype of someone who adopted personas in his music, and with every subsequent album he made, fans were always going to get introduced to someone new that reshaped the way they thought about ‘The Starman’s music. If we’re talking about the best of the bunch, though, it’s almost impossible to top what happened when a strange rock and roll alien fell to Earth in the early 1970s.

While albums like Hunky Dory had been building towards something new, ‘Life on Mars?’ was the first time the world was introduced to Ziggy Stardust. We wouldn’t get his full backstory until one album later, but listening through Bowie’s career, no other character comes close to this. ‘The Thin White Duke’ may have been more sinister and ‘Aladdin Sane’ may have been more brash, but none of them had songs like ‘Moonage Daydream’ or ‘Suffragette City’ at their disposal.

And when looking at the legacy of Bowie, it’s no shocker that this is the version of him that everyone will remember until the end of time. He may have set out to be a musical actor in every sense of the word, but there are far worse things to be typecast as than the resident rock and roll extraterrestrial who pointed the genre towards the future.