Cluckwork Orange: Minecraft, Chickens and the End of Shock
Here’s an article I wrote for The Guardian:
Once upon a time—1969, if we’re being precise—a man in silver trousers and eyeliner (that would be Alice Cooper) threw a chicken off the stage at a festival in Toronto. In his own words:
“I picked it up—I figured, you know, it’s a bird, it’ll fly. And I threw it back into the audience, figuring it’ll just fly away… and the audience tore it to pieces.”
The world lost its mind. The story followed the Alice Cooper band for decades in various retellings, growing feathers of its own. You don’t hear about it much these days, but for a while, it was the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll scandal.
If you dig deep enough, you might find that Alice is the innocent party in this incident as he claims, but you also might not. That’s show-biz folks! Still, I stumbled on a story today that made that chicken incident look like a deleted scene from The Muppets.
Because apparently, in 2025, kids—about 12 years old—are now taking live chickens to the cinema.
Specifically, to see A Minecraft Movie.
I’m not saying we’re culturally bankrupt, but when children are turning up dressed as in-game mobs and wielding poultry like performance props, it might be time for a word with our collective subconscious. The “Chicken Jockey”—for those who don’t speak fluent pixel—is a rare Minecraft mob: a baby zombie riding a chicken. Harmless on screen. Less so when unleashed on a cinema snack bar with the energy of the current WWE tag team champions entrance.
This is far from the rock apocalypse I imagined. But maybe it’s the one we deserve.
You can question how a chicken ended up at an Alice Cooper gig in the ’60s, but that was Toronto. It was a festival. Post–Summer of Love, the security was still recovering from its own acid trip. What I want to know is how a chicken gets into a multiplex in Utah—especially when I’ve been stopped from smuggling in a bottle of water. I’ve never been to Utah though so maybe it’s normal.
In this particular case, a kid bought the bird for $15 from a farm, smuggled it in, and lifted it high during the now-iconic “Chicken Jockey” moment. The chicken, reportedly, enjoyed some popcorn and survived the screening with more dignity than most of the adult cast.
All very high jinks, right? But still—if you were the chicken, you might have something to say about it. And if there’s such a thing as a chicken hive mind, maybe you’d rather spend an afternoon watching blocky zombies than become one of the 2.7 million chickens killed every single day by KFC... other brands are also available.
That’s not a typo. That’s 1 billion chickens a year. If those were dogs, horses or lions, the world would riot. But chickens? Chickens are cheap. Disposable. Forgotten before the bucket hits the recycling bin.
We now live in a time where it’s easier to sneak livestock into a cinema than a packet of crisps, where cosplay is a form of protest and the absurd becomes strangely sacred. We’re so desensitised to horror that a kid with a clucking sidekick somehow feels… quaint? At least it’s not a drone strike.
Our capacity for shock has flatlined. We can’t step far enough back from the noise to see the patterns anymore. Take those chickens, throw in a few cows, a billion pigs, and however many human lives we’ve lost to war in the past 12 months, and we’re swimming in blood—and nobody’s even counting the niche deaths.
All in the name of what? Profit? Pride?
Marilyn Manson was bang on the money with “the death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is just a statistic”. Humans are totally unable to put those sorts of numbers into any meaningful sense. Sit quietly for just one moment and try and establish in your mind a planet earth of 66 million years ago in which dinosaurs were still here. You just can’t equate it.
Once, the things that shocked us were ideas. Words. In 2025, books like Lolita, Animal Farm, The Well of Loneliness and Gender Queer still get yanked from shelves—not because they hurt anyone, but because they might make someone think too much. Meanwhile, 2 million chickens can die in a day and nobody loses sleep—unless one of them walks into a movie theatre. That’s the red line, apparently. Thinking is more dangerous than chickens these days. The world would much rather you didn’t think at all, and it’s enabling such a thing by keeping you in your comfortable chair for as long as possible, watching the first shiny thing that comes to hand on Netflix or YouTube… every single day of the week.
But it’s hard to be shocked in 2025. I grew up with everything that was meant to shock as my right-hand man: Alice and Kiss, The Evil Dead, Cannibal Ferox (banned in 31 countries), American Psycho, Persepolis. I’m not alone—that’s a fact you can take to the bank.
I don’t ever want to be that guy who is suggesting that things were much better in the past, but it was a far superior way to be shocked. There was a safety buffer known as ‘fiction’. Nobody became a cannibal from watching Ferox (it’s not even that good). But something shifted. The buffer dissolved. The shock bled into reality—not as isolated moments, but as daily background noise.
Maybe Alice had the right idea all along: chuck the damn bird and see what happens. Seems to be way of the world anyway.
