Billion Dollar Babies

The title track of Alice Cooper's biggest album is decadence performed with a knowing curl of the lip. The groove is slower and heavier than his singles usually allowed, built on a fat, strutting riff and Ezrin's dense production — layered guitars, cabaret piano, brass shadows, everything gilded and slightly rotten. Cooper trades verses with Donovan, whose fragile, high, folk-troubadour voice is such absurd casting against the sleaze that it becomes the point: innocence and corruption sharing a microphone. The lyric is about being bought and sold, about children of wealth and the appetites money manufactures, and it lands as both critique and celebration, refusing to choose. This was 1973, Watergate-era America, the band touring with a guillotine and a boa constrictor while the culture debated whether they were a threat; the song is the sound of that spectacle at its most self-aware. It's glam rock's American cousin — dirtier than Bowie, funnier than the Stones' rich-decay period. Good listening for a late night when you're in the mood for something lush and morally unbothered, or as the entry point to understanding how theatrical rock made excess an art form rather than an accident.