Marilyn Manson Is My Anti-Hero
An Innocent Devil
This is not an apology. This is a fuck you.
Logic can’t compete with the certainty of the common idiot. I’ve always known that. Take the average schoolyard altercation or the mid-week, exhaustion fueled workplace argument with a fellow employee. Nine times out of ten the fucking idiots will always side with the asshole. It’s just how it’s always been. Look at what’s popular. Seldom does something that deserves popularity achieve it. Occasionally something worthy will snake its way in. More often than not it’s just a bunch of cunty rubbish. Especially in this ‘woke’ era wasteland, where the rainbow painted guillotines await the careers of anyone who has ever been accused of anything. It seems like all the entertainers nowadays are just a bunch of sycophants. No one wants to say the wrong thing. However the wrong thing is increasingly becoming saying what is fact. And speaking of facts …
Brain Hugh Warner saved my life.
That’s no exaggeration. As a weirdo little fucker in a Kentucky high school, I loathed life. High school is a spotlight on your every flaw, real or imaginary. No messiah swooped in to make it all better. No brilliant preacher or little boy loving priest saved the day. DARE programs and Officer Friendly bullshit didn’t pull the blade from my wrist. Deep, challenging conversations with concerned teachers didn’t prevent the gun to my pimply temple. After all, teachers don’t want anything to do with the kind of students like I was, lower class income cracker kids with shabby clothes, introverted as fuck and typically following the rules.
Teachers gravitate toward extroverted, middle or upper-class gregarious shits who end up getting popped in the face when a bullied kid goes rogue and shows up to class with pappy’s pistols.
Teachers immerse themselves into the lives of ethnic kids as a kind of banner that reads: ‘Look! I’m racially cool! Yay for me!’ That or they fuck them. I guess that’s a trend that has been going on far longer than the school system cares to admit. The fact that teachers vouchsafe their attention on popular kids and then sneak a fuck in here and there exemplifies that when you’re in school, there’s no one to really turn to. Even teachers have that student mentality.
I can’t imagine what school’s like in the progressive nightmare that society is today.
I am certain if you’re just a little hetero, lower income, free lunch, painfully shy, bepimpled cracker like I was, you simply VANISH into the thin quasi-inclusive air of high school.
Needless to say, I was pretty fucking lost.
Like all horny kids, I had about a hundred crushes but the thought of talking to a girl or having one prance up and start talking to me made my pimples boil. It unnerved me altogether when a girl would ask me a question or comment on a t-shirt I was wearing. But man, I thought about girls nonstop and dreamed of being something or someone that wasn’t so weird, so ugly, shy and different. Therein lies the thing that most bled me of my confidence. I had friends and I loved them as much as a kid could love a pal. They really helped me through some hard times. But it just wasn’t enough. I couldn’t maintain any level of confidence. I had no soundtrack. I was just too goddamn different.
I remember the moment I saw ‘The Beautiful People’ music video on MTV back in 1996.
At maximum goth overload, the Reznor/Ogilvie produced masterpiece surprised the listener with a synth-organ bridge that momentarily jerked you from the industrial, maggoty onslaught and filled your mind with black lipstick maidens in cemeteries. Then it banged into the simple yet crushing chorus that sums up every disgruntled, on the edge teen’s existence.
there’s no time to discriminate
hate every motherfucker that’s in your way
hey you, what do you see?
something beautiful, something free?
hey you, are you trying to be mean?
you live with apes, man, it’s hard to be clean
- The Beautiful People
I was fifteen and it was daylight. The video premiered and things for me were never the same. The ‘apes’ Manson screamed of were my family, my classmates, the teachers, everyone. You couldn’t be clean with all this soulless detritus scattered around your world. Goddamn. These were my people. This art was the tangled mass of cancerous loneliness and hate eating up my heart. What a big FUCK YOU.
I turned 16 less than a month after Antichrist Superstar was released and asked my dad to buy it for my birthday.
We drove to Electronic Avenue and More and I found the CD. The album art itself impressed me with its dark, stark, Nazi like imagery. This little gem fulfilled me for the rest of fall and winter. Inside that CD were the gems I needed to get through the rest of my school year, my life. I read and reread the lyrics while listening to the music, smelling that new CD jacket smell. No other CD I owned thereafter ever had such a glorious scent. I learned many things from Antichrist. It soldered some fucking grit onto my all too gentle and easily bruised heart. It even strengthened my vocabulary.
I can’t believe in the things
that don’t believe in me
now it’s your turn to see misanthropy
– 1996
I had the CD in my Sony Bass Boost boom box, listening to it on some metal banded headphones with fuzzy cloth covered earpieces. I saw the word I’d never even heard of before and reread it. I looked it up (back then I had no alternative but to look it up in a physical copy of a dictionary like a goddamn caveman) and fell in love with it.
misanthropy – n – the general hatred, dislike, distrust or contempt of the human species, human behavior or human nature.
Wow, I thought. I am a misanthrope. I had a new word. I had a bit of armor in the form of an identity. I stared at the CD cover, nothing and Interscope label insignias, Manson on the outside of the cardboard that the CD jewel case came in. On it a circle showed four points: 1. heart 2. mind 3. complacent 4. malice. I had discovered this album right on time, at the peak of my misanthropy, the point of malice, number 4. I’d gotten the album on November 4th. These things seemed universally ordained to a hateful, shy, newly 16 year-old in the pre-internet boom 1990’s (16 is four 4’s). It made about as much sense as astrology or Christianity anyway. I was hooked like a motherfucker. It wasn’t long until I got A Portrait of an American Family and Smells Like Children via five finger discount.
Being a teenager in the 90’s and hearing a song like Lunchbox for the first time is incomprehensible to the average citizen.
But anyone who has ever been bullied or abused can take its anthemic chorus and apply the lyrics to how they feel inside.
I wanna grow up
I wanna be
a big rock n roll star
I wanna grow up
I wanna be
so no one fucks with me
- Lunchbox
And then I got my first real-life girlfriend. I’ve described this girl as taking my v-card and cracking it over her vag like a twig. She was the epitome of 90’s rocker chicks, the darker mainstream kind into Type O Negative and White Zombie. And of course Manson. She was the first person I knew who had a Manson shirt. It blew my little mind. Her shirt was Portrait era. I remember the moment I realized I was in love with her. This combustion of jealous fire jettisoned my capacity to reason. That was the moment that Manson’s rendition of a Screaming Jay Hawkins’ classic resonated with me. Smells Like Children is a weird and silly EP, but shit gets serious with this song.
Instantly my horror movie loving little ass recognized the camera shutter intro lifted from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all the wonderfully creepy undertones that such an addition inspires. The murderous implications within the song, delivered in Manson fashion, hit the nail on her little blonde head for me.
I put a spell on you
because you’re mine
I can’t stand the things that you do
No I ain’t lying.
- Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, I Put a Spell On You
That and the two other covers from Children, The Eurythmics ‘Sweet Dreams’ and Patti Smith’s ‘Rock n Roll Nigger’ solidify Manson as the artist who can take a song and give it his special blend of mind-bending eroticism and darkling bass chugging straightaway rock & roll and make it his own while honoring the sacrosanct sphere of rock acolytes. The intro to the Patti Smith version is pure punk poetry.
I don’t fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future
At heart I’m an American artist
I seek pleasure
I seek the nerves under your skin
- Patti Smith, Rock n Roll Nigger
Contiguous with Manson’s intro to her song, you see not only the similarities of being a literature loving female punker in the 70’s but the stark contrast to being an eruditely rock enthusiast outcast in the 80’s, as Brian Warner was, to the burgeoning artist he’d become in the 90’s.
and the world spreads its legs for another fucking star
cuz I am the all American antichrist
I was raised in America and America hates me for what I am
I am your shit
you should be ashamed of what you have eaten
- Marilyn Manson, Rock n Roll Nigger
I can’t think of a more fitting explanation of the phenomena that is Marilyn Manson. And back in the mid to late 90’s this man and his band were a cultural shock to the system. It’s something that can’t be duplicated, the fear that this band put into small town bible thumpers across the Midwest. I remember when Manson came to Evansville, Indiana. The news station covered the event and all these Christians muddied the show by haranguing goth people and lovers of rock who just wanted to jam out to a great concert. The ‘jesus crispies’ which is what my late friend Ashley referred to them as, accosted everyone, handing out fliers for Jesus and trying to persuade the ne’er-do-well attendees away from the dark side and into the light of the lord.
If anything in the world will make a rock band explode to superstar status, it’s the Christian church denouncing them.
And it worked like a motherfucker for Manson. My girlfriend and her friend went to a Manson show, chaperoned by her mom and were thoroughly rocked. I caught up with them the next day and my girlfriend’s friend hopped up and down, beside herself with joy. “He spit on me!” she screeched, pointing at the area on her face where the Manson loogie landed. I never imagined years later Manson would be arrested for spitting at a camera woman, ultimately surrendering to New Hampshire police because this person made a big deal out of an incident that happens at rock shows all the time. It’s notable because these people who think they deserve to have police look into what they consider to be horrible travesties against themselves must think that the police have an unlimited reservoir of manpower to handle these things. In the age of defunded police programs across the country, it highlights the reality even more that if you think that you being spat upon by a rock star is more important than the hundreds of other real cases in that community, it says a lot more about you than it does the phlegm slinger.
As a 16 year-old in Kentucky in the 90’s, I lamentably didn’t know a lot about David Lynch.
I’d seen the Elephant Man but had no idea that Lynch had made the seminal film. Directors, with the exception of Oliver Stone, just weren’t on my radar. But I did notice one movie of Lynch’s back then due to a soundtrack. One day in early 1997, I made the trek with my cousin to K Mart to steal the Lost Highway CD. I’d like to say I’m not proud of being such a little thief but I kind of am. It was the piracy of the times, when you actually had to steal the physical product. I went into the store wearing my Michigan Starter jacket, found the Lost Highway soundtrack, and eyed the song list. Fuck yeah, Nails. ‘The Perfect Drug’. That video was all over MTV back then and rocked like a motherfucker. Rammstein. Yeah, those dudes with the squirting stage dick. Smashing Pumpkins. Cool. Two Manson songs? Fuck yeah. Wait, I already had one. Fuck. Oh well. ‘Apple of Sodom’. Yeah, it sounded worth it. I took the CD, walked to where no cameras could see me and put it under my jacket. I got to the restroom and cut the CD from its plastic anti-theft device. I walked out the door with a new Manson song.
‘Apple of Sodom’ is a lurking jam and didn’t please me at the time. I wanted something rocking but ‘Apple’ never erupts. I’ve since grown to love it. Coincidentally, the first CD I’d ever stolen was Fiona Apple’s Tidal. I was OBSESSED with Miss Apple and adored her up and down. Apparently so did Manson. The song ‘Apple of Sodom’ was supposedly inspired by his fancy for her.
“If I was ever to be put in a circumstance where I could have sex with her, I would decline because her vagina is probably too precious to be dirtied by my filthy cock,” Manson said referring to Miss Apple’s vagina.
Later, my friend and I would get high and rent the Lost Highway VHS from a local video store and be mystified by it. But both of us were elated to see Manson and Twiggy appear in the film. It made it worth the two and half bucks that we otherwise felt we’d wasted. We were teens, we were high, and this shit was weird.
Weirder still was a little video recorded at the Ambassador Hotel, which is of note to any Camelot/Kennedy buffs.
This was the hotel ballroom that Robert Kennedy, after winning South Dakota and California in the Democratic presidential primary, was shot three times by a Palestinian born in Jerusalem, just under seven miles from where the big J (that’s Jesus Christ for all you godless heathens) himself was allegedly birthed. But this video was probably nothing that the big J would like. Not with the homoerotism flush throughout it. As a teen I’d never seen fucking shit like it. At one point in this music video, you’re staring at a slim-breasted babe and a half-naked Manson traipsing around a hotel room. The next instant, you’re witnessing a still shot of Manson showing the breasts/pecs of a trans person. Now this was in 1997, pre-internet and mind blowing. I mean I loved this dude to death but what in the fuck was going on here? I learned later that Manson has always been hetero and that his art is beyond the confines of sexuality, but still. I was like, “Is Manson fucking dudes?” But guess what? I didn’t give a fuck. I loved him regardless. And that is a lesson in itself. The catalyst for all this eye opening shit was a film called Spawn based on a character by artist Todd Macfarlane.
Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez wrote ‘Long Hard Road Out of Hell’ for the film and the track holds up magnificently. The production is stellar as always and has an explosive chorus that I craved back in my teens. Such a satisfying track, I watched the video every time MTV aired it, never quite not being mystified by the homoerotic debauchery I was witnessing. It reminded me of watching Dead or Alive videos with my mom on MTV as a kid and seeing Pete Burns just unabashedly shake his fucking ass for the camera with such androgynous flair that it never seemed weird to me. I never thought, “Wow, that singer dude is really doing his best to look like a chick.” I just thought, “That is Pete Burns and my mom loves him and so do I.”
I can’t express how beautiful of a song ‘Long Hard Road Out of Hell’ was to me then, especially as a teenager drawn to dark weird shit who was never going to fit in anyway so fuck it. This shit really saved my soul. I could hammer away at this keyboard until the apocalypse and I still wouldn’t get close to how much this shit came to my rescue. I was young, I was lost, I had nothing to guide me. This weird tall dude in makeup and female lingerie was my Christ-figure and I deluged him with praise by building a shrine in my room and by constantly worshiping his music.
to be this young
is oh so scary.
- Long Hard Road Out of Hell
That song is still the fucking shit and I’ve read that it’s one of Manson’s favorites too. Kelli Ali from the Sneaker Pimps, who is the female doing vocals on the track, called it actual ‘shit’, upset at the Manson band hijacking what was initially a collaboration. Manson titled his autobiography after the song and that book was a wild ride in and of itself.
Fact or fiction, I was delighted to know he and I had so many favorite musical acts in common. I loved him and and the whole cast of characters that made up his band: Olivia Newton Bundy and Zsa Zsa Speck and Twiggy Ramirez and Madonna Wayne Gacy and Gidget Gein and Ginger Fish and Zim Zum. I will always love Daisy Berkowitz too. His guitars on Portrait sound delicious. They’re like sweet crunches of darkness. RIP Daisy.
In 1998, Manson released Mechanical Animals.
An avid MTV junkie back in the time of music videos, I eagerly awaited the first single. When ‘The Dope Show’ was released, I was like, “What the fuck is this?” Disappointed, I searched frantically for my goth hero king. Instead I got an androgynous space alien with red hair - Alice Cooper replaced with David Bowie.
I wanted my black haired devil worshiper back. Although I still loved Manson, my interest waned. While I dug ‘I Don’t Like the Drugs But the Drugs Like Me’ and ‘Rock is Dead’, it wasn’t what I was expecting. In the ensuing years, I’ve come to love the album, the slower tracks like ‘The Speed of Pain’ and ‘The Last Day on Earth’ owning space in my little black heart.
Just remember when you think you’re free
the crack inside your fucking heart is me
- The Speed of Pain
And these lines which sum up how most people who’ve outgrown their petty shit look back on days gone by:
Yesterday was a million years ago
in all my past lives I played an asshole
- The Last Day on Earth
And if you were sick of religious people trying to make you feel fucking terrible about every goddamn little thing you did then this lyric touched your black soul:
Norm life, baby
We’re talk shown and we’re pointing just like christians at a suicide
- I Don’t Like the Drugs But the Drugs Like Me
Which brings me to my mother and I clashing.
When I was a wee lad, we lived on a street called Lewis Lane, not Louis but Lewis, as in Lewis Carroll (we’ll return to this when we get to the Eat Me, Drink Me album). At the edge of the backyard was a row of dense bushes. If you pushed beyond these bushes and stepped over the crayons melted onto plywood left by me and other neighborhood kids in the summer sun, you’d see a hill of dirt. After climbing this hill, an expanse of sepia brush and deformed trees went on for eternity. Eternity to a child like me anyway. I spent so much time out there in this freedom of nothingness, living like Jeliza-Rose in a setting out of Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s marvelous novel Tideland.
I think this landscape fueled my love for all things moors like the Brontës, for isolated weirdness like David Lynch and for the scary uncertainty that walking into the unknown brings. But I could always turn around at any moment and push back through those Wonderland-like mirror-bushes and return to my mom, who would unfailingly be inside the house jamming out.
Before she found Jesus my mom was cool as fuck.
She was goth in Kentucky in the early 80’s, no easy feat and had the rock taste credentials to prove it. My mom was into The Cure, Culture Club, WASP and New Order. She recorded on VHS The Damned’s ‘Shadow of Love’ and played it repeatedly. My mother was so into Dave Vanian that she got a mannequin from the music store that my father worked at and made a female version of him, even putting fangs and blood on the dummy’s mouth. It never occurred to me until later, when Jesus and shit had demolished the fascinating wonderland that my mother had created back then, just how ahead of her time she was, so cool and unique.
She had no one to communicate her interests with. My dad was just an Elvis nut and never really got into her kind of music. So my mom plied me with all these videos and music and I adored it because I adored my mom. I’d hang with her in her darkened bedroom that looked like something from a Stevie Nick’s video and just exist in the stereo’s sounds. My mom was so depressed back then that sometimes she didn’t do anything but stay in that room all day. I understand that when she renounced rock and demonic imagery that she was doing it because she felt it no longer served her. She’d found religion and needed it to save her from the darkness that weighed her down. So she threw away all that awesome music. No more Dave Vanian singing about the ‘Shadow of Love’ or ‘Psychomania’. No more listening to Blackie Lawless screaming about how he wanted to be somebody. In that awesome music’s stead came a bunch of shitty ass Christian Rock like Petra and White Cross, tasting on the carnivorous rocker tongue like vegan chicken. Just a sad replacement for what was essentially only music. But this was at the height of religious fucks like Pat Robertson really pushing the ‘devil music’ agenda and it got to my mom, infecting her like a motherfucker. She was never the same.
It's strange to look back on the wild difference in who my mom was before and after religion sank its evil fucking claws into her. It is the tale of a zombie virus.
Around thirteen I came out as an atheist to my parents and they pretty much shit themselves the way you could imagine parents in the deep south reacting to their kid coming out as gay.
I didn’t believe in that shit anymore. I thought religion was dumb as fuck then and still do. I’ve always found that debating with Christians is like petting an excitable cat. You’ll get a couple strokes in but eventually out come their claws. So when I started showing interest in the Manson band, my mom’s interest perked up too. She looked at the CDs, watched clips of the vids and looked at him on the magazines in the stores. She watched the news comment on him being so bad for the youth and shit. I want to say it’s hard to imagine now at how the news channels had an organized agenda against Manson but fuck - is it that hard to imagine? Look what happened during Columbine. Look at what happened with Evan Rachel Wood, not a lick of fucking proof. None. It's mind boggling but this dude has had the media’s AR-15 pointed at his head from the goddamn get-go. So when Jesus fans started denouncing him outside shows, my mom ‘took on the armor of christ’ and went to war.
I tried to explain to my mom that the anti-god hype around Manson was blown out of proportion. Meanwhile…
She shit on my love for Manson at every fucking turn. I’d get a magazine with him on it and she’d bring up how he was a devil worshiper. I’d put up a new poster and she’d give me shit about him being against the lord. I’d blast his music in my room and she’d shout at how I was satanic. I just wanted to jam out to this band that was giving me confidence in being different and my mom was going full Bobby Boucher’s Momma on me. Everything was “the devil.”
This shit went on consistently for months until finally I broke.
Literally. I said, “I am so fucking sick of you cutting me down and telling me I’m going to hell for this shit.” I went into my room and gathered up my Manson CDs and charged into the kitchen. There sat my mom with her bible and cigarettes, the woman who’d told me her mother had thrown out her ‘evil’ albums. I’d have forgiven her quicker had she not been an Alice Cooper fan in her youth. She’s the one who got me into dudes with black hair in makeup singing dark shit. I once tried to reason with her: “Marilyn Manson doesn’t have a single song about necrophilia. I can think of three by Alice off the top of my head.”
She’d always said her mom tossed out her Cooper vinyl. Well, I was going to show her just how fucking fed up I was with her hypocrisy. “Here,” I said and took my Manson CDs out onto the back porch steps. I angled them against the steps in such a way that I could snap them with the heel of my foot. And then I did just that. I walked back through the kitchen and said, “Are you fuckin happy?” and marched back to my room. I tore my posters down. I just snapped.
I’m not sure how my mother reacted to what I did.
She never mentioned it. Anytime I brought it up to her in later years, she remained blank. But it fucked me up. I still kept up with Manson though, not so clandestinely but not really overtly either. I kept the TV volume low because I didn’t want a Jesus speech every time I tried to enjoy a goddamn song. For a while, my love for rock stagnated. My mom had drained it of its fun by taking it so seriously. Gradually, though, my jones for rock overtook me again. I had destroyed my house of worship but remained loyal to the God of Fuck.
By that time, Manson was unapologetically steamrolling conventionality.
And in a fashion that is unthinkable by today’s standards where no one can utter anything if it hurts someone else’s feelings. It really felt like a demonic movement. I fucking loved it. I read everything I could about Manson in the rock mags and watched his interviews. I was enthralled and wrapped up in the rock mystique. Was this guy the kid from Wonder Years? Did he have a rib removed to suck his own dick? Did he actually turn himself into a worm? Is he a hermaphrodite? What the fuck is going on with this dude? I had no clue if he was queer, a satanist, a trans or if he was just a rock god splitting psyches via MTV. And I loved it.
And then on 4/20/1999 a couple of kids walked into their school in Colorado and changed shit forever, not only for their community but for Manson.
Manson received the bulk of responsibility for kids killing kids. Why? I don’t think anyone can explain that, not even the killers, who were actually fans of Slayer, a completely different type of music. But it unhinged Manson and revealed him to be a person with a heart after all. To think that people thought he was someone out to have children destroy each other crippled him, forcing him into seclusion where he spent his time painting and probably getting super fucked up.
His rebuttal to media and religious insistence that he be blamed for the Columbine massacre was the album Holy Wood, released in November of 2000. I remember driving my then girlfriend to the mall so she could get it. And goddamn. What a fucking rock-a-thon. What a majestic FUCK YOU, delivered with an everlasting resonance that all castigated artists dream about.
Do you love your guns?
God?
Government?
- The Love Song
That was a big fuck you to everyone in the country indebted to a god who commanded them not to be beholden to any other idols and not to kill – yet these same people made sure to keep the church and the state separated so they could put nationalism and the right to bear arms above the almighty.
Despite all this, Manson insists he’s not the word that he taught me – a misanthrope. Which only makes sense when you consider that, however the world at present treats Mr. Manson, a large contingency of rock music enthusiasts honor him as the 1990s torchbearer of shock rock, carrying on in the tradition of Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper and Kiss. Even Elvis, too, when you consider that probably nothing in rock history has been more shocking than a cracker from Tupelo dying his hair black and dancing around suggestively while singing black people music.
To be able to say you’re not a misanthrope in today’s society is one of three things: a lie, a feat of supreme strength, or a lesson waiting to be learned.
Or maybe there’s a fourth option for extremely fortunate people: to be admired and loved so much as an entertainer that it voids all the pain that most of us all are slathered in without respite. But I’ve never made the claim that I’m not a misanthrope. I’ve had to fight for every little footing of love I’ve found in this world. And that’ll do a number on a motherfucker. You’ll crack, you’ll revolt, and become godless. But you’ll do your best to remain true to yourself.
I’m not a slave to a god that doesn’t exist
and I’m not a slave to a world that doesn’t give a shit
- The Fight Song
I’ve never heard such beautiful lyrics in my life. I continued loving Manson. My friends and I watched him in stop motion splendor as a little claymated fighter on Celebrity Death Match. It seemed Manson had overcome the fallout of the Columbine massacre. All the cancelled shows, the depressive episodes and bad publicity had manifested into some killer art.
In 2002 I didn’t have shit-else going on so when my girl told me she was going to a suburb of Chicago to finish off her collegiate career I said fuck it, quit my job, ditched my apartment and went with her.
A few months later in 2003, we were watching a music channel up there and Manson’s ‘mOBSCENE’ aired. It blew us the fuck away, unexpected as all things were back before the full throttle notifications of the present day internet. We were like ‘Holy fuck! Manson’s got a new album!’ We went to Target, where we promptly bought The Golden Age of Grotesque and a paperback of Cujo.
That’s how I remember those last few months I lived in Illinois, reading and listening to this awesome album. It wasn’t long afterwards that my girl and I broke up. Nothing was really ever the same for me after that. I took that shit very hard. To this day, I can’t explain why. I understand we all go through heartbreak and shit, but when this girl left me I just crumbled like a bitch. I was just too much of a poet, a dreamer, a little alcoholic weirdo. I got into fights with random people, I got arrested over and over, I stopped writing. I just collapsed both inner and outer. I loved that bitch. I didn’t live in the era of No Contact Rules or having bitches on rotation or whatever. I had this idea of love and shit in my heart. Which, as I learned, was a bad fucking idea.
You drained my heart
and made a spade
but there’s still traces
of me in your veins
- Spade
In the interest of not digressing into how much this chick’s dumping of me crushed my soul, I’ll digress with a poorly constructed segue.
A thing to mention about Manson’s albums is the impeccable recording quality of every single track.
Regardless if you like the Reverend or not, or find his lyrics distasteful or his personal life objectionable, you cannot deny the superlative production of his records. Anytime I mention Manson to someone in the know, they always comment on the bass, which consistently sounds thick, lush and precisely textured. This trend, including the remix cuts on Smells like Children, has been maintained from the beginning. Even when listening to the Spooky Kids tracks you can’t help but think, Fuck, even this early shit sounds pretty fucking great.
I highlight this not only because he’s a performer and it’s pertinent to his legacy but also because it demonstrates how important his art is to him. To maintain such a level of quality is no easy feat. But somehow Manson has managed it. Exquisite leveling and mixing from start to finish cannot just be blind luck over such a storied and prolific career. 11 studio albums is quite the oeuvre.
6 AM, Christmas morning
No shadows, no reflections here
Lying cheek to cheek in your cold embrace
- If I Was Your Vampire
So begins Mr. Manson’s sixth studio album, Eat Me, Drink Me. Through the internet, I knew that around this time Manson was trying to make a film about Lewis Carroll, the penname of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and also the name of the above mentioned street I lived on as a kid, Lewis Lane. I’ve always felt a connection to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I hate Disney shit, but I’ve always enjoyed Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland. It’s so fucking weird. How could a person not like it? I’m sure Manson does and I was eager to see how his biopic would turn out. Certainly it’d fare no worse than Rob Zombie’s films. But shit went awry, even with the goddess Lily Cole as Alice and Manson himself as Carroll. Browsing the promotional posters made up for this film and the pre-production stills boggles the fan’s mind and makes you wonder what the film could have been like. Probably a spooky ass, riveting motherfucker. But it never came to fruition. In the words of the late, great Dr. Gonzo, “Goddamn, what a bummer.”
What we did get was an album suddenly minus one awesome guitarist: John 5. The guy who’d been busting out bad ass riffs for Manson departed the band on good terms. Manson still had Skold and they put out a pretty rocking album, although it was in many ways like Alice Cooper’s Lace and Whiskey album, where the gimmick is nearly dropped. A sentimentality that would follow into the next album pervades Eat Me, Drink Me and can be attributed to Manson’s ill fated union with the ‘acting wunderkind’ Evan Rachel Wood, the amalgamation of a privileged Alice Liddell meets Dolores Haze come to life. And subsequently come to destroy. This woman is pretty much responsible for the previous 6,000 words you’ve read and the subsequent ones as well. Because as much as I love Manson, it had never occurred to me to defend him in written form, despite all the chaos and shit he’s endured. And then this chick reappeared out of nowhere into Manson’s life, conveniently around the time he’d found current wife, artist Lindsay Usich Warner.
But back to Evan…
She’s no stranger to being in music videos, having been in Green Day’s ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ in 2005, oddly enough co-starring with the Billy Elliott actor who’d eventually be her hubby.
But it’s the video for Manson’s ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses (When The Heart Guides The Hand)’ that has sparked such controversy and accusations against the Reverend. This video, aside from Evan, who’s undeniably gorgeous in her heart-shaped glasses, isn’t very memorable in the annals of Manson vids. ‘Dope Hat’ and the ‘Sweet Dreams’ videos beat the shit out of ‘Heart-Shape’ with nary a jab. It’s a decent vid, with Miss Wood suggestively pawing herself while a Poison-era Alice Cooper-looking Manson sings onstage.
she said, “Kiss me, it’ll heal but it won’t forget.”
- Heart-Shaped Glasses
This relationship with Wood, much like the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard fiasco, would eventually be the untethering of everything that even remotely touched Manson’s career. My friend remarked at the time of their union how odd a pair Manson and Wood made. I just added it up to rock star excess and needing someone different. It’s eerie, with Twilight Zone ambience, how little we understand which decisions we make today will impact our future. And in what way and magnitude. If you believe Manson’s story that he never harmed Wood outside the consensual and typical efforts anyone endures during a relationship – and I indeed do believe him – then you can’t help but to want to go back in time and scream at him to get as far away as possible from the Westworld actress.
love is a fire
burns down all that it sees
burns down everything
- Just a Car Crash Away
Around the release of Manson’s next album The High End of Low in 2009, I was pretty much over life.
I drank months away like it wasn’t anything. I kept a job just to keep a place to drink and money to get alcohol. I listened to a lot of Joy Division around this time, ideating an Ian Curtis-like suicide. The new Manson album didn’t strike my fancy very much. ‘Devour’, the first track – now one of my favorites – missed me altogether in my morose state. The fourth track perked me up. I had never heard anything like this from the Reverend.
everyone will come, everyone will come
to my funeral to make sure that I stay dead
you can’t take this from me
forbidden in heaven and useless in hell
- Four Rusted Horses
Now this I could get behind. And the track after that, ‘Arma-goddamn-motherfuckin-geddon’, was something straight out of the Portrait days.
Gradually, I came to love the album but I couldn’t help but think that something was off about my favorite rock star. Culminating with the end of his marriage to vedette Dita Von Teese, it’s no surprise that the album is more somber than any other Manson offer to date. The Wood debacle also fueled its melancholy, and little did Manson fans know that this snuffed flame was actually a spark.
so turn around, walk away
before you confuse the way we abuse each other
if you’re not afraid of getting hurt
then I’m not afraid of how much I hurt you.
- Leave a Scar
Tracks like ‘Blank and White’ and ‘Wight Spider’ pulled me from my Joy Division doldrums and I eventually met another girl who strangled my despair for a time. I even gave her my copy of High End. Upon our calling it quits, she gave me the CD back. I put it in my truck’s stereo and rocked out of that driveway a free man.
After that came Born Villain.
The album cover is notable because its photographer is one Lindsay Usich, who’d later go onto become Mrs. Manson.
This record required repeated listens before the songs ever sunk into my psyche. The songs give me agoraphobia, feeling too wide and liminal. And just like a landscape absent of markers, I felt a discouraging location blindness while listening to them. Choruses and verses didn’t connect for me. I couldn’t distinguish tracks from one another and when I tried, it took forever because most of the intros are lengthy slow burns. Maybe it was the lack of Ginger Fish’s drumming, who’d ditched the band. Maybe it was the immense creative input of Twiggy versus Manson. Regardless of what contributed to Villain’s knackering pace, a track inspired by Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal does more than make up for any of the album’s flaws.
The fucking bass line is some of the coolest shit laid down in rock history, a menacing warning that some witchy shit is about to go down. And then the chorus breaks in like bursting through the fog and onto a castle-laden racetrack while driving a souped-up hearse.
I’ve been running from the bloodless for fear of exile
for all of my sorceries
that shun the light.
- The Flowers of Evil
While I dig the album, it’s always my last to suggest to any burgeoning Manson listener. I’ve read reviews citing Villain as Manson’s heaviest, even a returning to Antichrist form. But I think any avid Manson fan will disagree entirely with these assertions. While it’s not a bad album, it slides out of forthwith rock & roll and almost into prog rock.
One exception I always recommend is the bonus track ‘You’re So Vain’, a cover of the 1972 Carly Simon hit, partially about Warren Beatty.
This song is interesting for several reasons that include having Johnny Depp on guitar and being yet another awesome cover by Marilyn Manson of a female artist. No metal act has ever consistently released album worthy versions of female-written songs with such dedication to the source material as Manson. From Annie Lennox to Patti Smith to Carly Simon, Manson has paid tribute to his admiration of art from the fairer sex, the antithesis of misogyny.
After this album, I figured Manson’s straightaway, no nonsense rocking days were over. I was wrong as fuck.
I fell in love with Marilyn Manson in 1996. Nearly 20 years later he released a legitimate rival to his greatest album. Antichrist Superstar will always be the #1 album of all time to me. It’s the undisputed crown of irascible, ‘fuck you and Jesus’ industrial rock. But for an older version of me, The Pale Emperor sailed into my port right on time and tied or at least came in second. I’d just gotten sober and was feeling a slow reawakening within myself. I’d just pulled out of a relationship and a bout of excessive drinking that very well looked like the end of the line for yours truly. How’d I do it? No fucking clue. I just did it. It was weird. But at the time, I’d drank and drove my license away and was on foot. In my earbuds was this gem of a record and I listened to this bitch from start to finish as I walked and biked my way through my year long license suspension. From the first track on down, this fucker made me take a second look at what I thought was a fledgling rocker and see him for what he was: a consummate crafter of rock songs with no signs of waning on the horizon.
Along with Tyler Bates, who’d scored the campy Tammy and the T-Rex and The Last Time I Committed Suicide (a film about Beat God Neal Cassady and starring everyone from Keanu Reeves to Gretchen Mol to Thomas Jane to Adrien Brody), Manson crafted a perfect record.
Juxtapose this against the fact that Bates had just come off the success of scoring Guardians of the Galaxy and you get the type of good old fashion mind-fuck that Manson never fails to deliver.
The album’s title is somewhat in tribute to the first atheist emperor of Rome. And the cover art is a classy, mature Manson. Dashing, his face and hand are blurred and transparent mid-gesticulation. No words. Just an image and 10 rocking tracks (13 if you got it deluxe) within.
These tracks guided me through what I can only remember as being dark and uncertain streets during that weird limbo of being a fuck up on the verge of some kind of permanent jail or death and this new weird sober life that I was embarking on. I felt sad but hopeful. I felt mentally weary, but physically strong.
I’m feeling stoned and alone like a heretic
and I’m ready to meet my maker
Lazarus got no dirt on me
Lazarus got no dirt on me
and I rise to every occasion
I’m the Mephistopheles of Los Angeles
- The Mephistopheles of Los Angeles
And here we are. All these years later and I found a new favorite Manson song. It went from ‘The Reflecting God’ to track number 7 on Emperor. As much as I perambulated the caliginous city on foot at that time, its groove impeccably fit my mood. The drum beat is that of a bad ass walking through hell. They say ‘walk like you are the boss’ but this track makes you ‘walk like you just killed the boss’. I was lost but at least I was moving. I had nothing. But I had a weird force in the universe watching over me.
At least I know
wherever I go
I got the Devil beneath my feet.
- The Devil Beneath My Feet
Goth rock, baby. You couldn’t hit the target with more fidelity than this album. Not in 2015, anyway.
I listened to 2017’s Heaven Upside Down on a road trip to Salem, Massachusetts.
This is an album so full of gothic autumn vibes you just want to drink a chalice of blood and run outside and jump into a pile of leaves once the needle drops. I was so amped about this record when I heard the first snippet of what was initially the title track (it was, after all, the 10th studio album) before the title was changed. A clip emerged online of not yet elected President Trump beheaded by Manson and featured the ‘Say10’ chorus. I couldn’t wait to see that entire video. Unfortunately, it wasn’t released. But what’s better than the God of Fuck assassinating the President? You guessed it: a video of Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson flanked by an assortment of black and white babes.
You say god
I say Say10
- Say10
I was in music video heaven. I had a delightfully demonic year. I was sober and back on the road and I was taking no shit and doing weird shit.
The deity Saturn is a focal point on the album. This agriculture god was honored by festivities where people got fucked up and let slaves have a go at their masters. It’s like Christmas without the deliberate obfuscation of the pagan element. With musical winks to Joy Division peppered throughout, ‘Saturnalia’ reminds me of ‘The Flowers of Evil’ on Born Villain, with its portentous bassline and crashing-through-the-veil-of-reality chorus.
I don’t wanna be another bullet hole
in the exit sign of your road
so just smile like a rifle
hard metal in the setting sun
- Saturnalia
Lisa Marie Presley and Courtney Love even appear in the music video for ‘Tattooed in Reverse’.
The album is dedicated to Manson’s father, Hugh Warner, who died before it was completed. Marilyn’s mother died in 2014. He was now in that awkward adult stage where no parents remain. The melancholy on the next record, while still a rocker, would be palpable.
What makes Evan Rachel Wood’s accusations and the alleged ‘victim recruiting’ she engaged in all the more terrible is 2020’s Shooter Jennings and Marilyn Manson produced We Are Chaos.
This is not the album of an aging 90’s shock rocker going in for a last hurrah. It’s not a desperate money grab laden with schlock to scam a few extra bucks out of the loyal listeners. This is part three in a trilogy of albums starting with The Pale Emperor redefining Marilyn Manson as an artist. In no other musician before him has there ever been such a limitless reservoir, not of one hit wonders, but entire albums that mesmerize. There’s not a wasted track on We Are Chaos. From start to finish, you envisage, “My god. This in no way sounds like someone who’s been at this for thirty years. This sounds like someone who’s just getting started, just hitting their stride and may very well keep on stepping into the future.” This slightly more mellow, still sinister Manson is just as entertaining as the barely clad, long black haired screamer of the mid-90’s. Maybe even more so. The self-portrait album artwork is beautiful, painted with as much texture as was put into the songs within.
We Are Chaos’s first single begins disjointedly, not quite linear. Pair that with an impending legal onslaught and the death of Manson’s father, however, and its saccharine vulnerability feels genuine and begins to align. The song is tragic, acknowledging the bliss within our own imperfections. It depicts watching the people you cherish most fade into the ether and how it affects your life afterwards, decisions to continue this, to discard that.
Once you’ve inhaled death
everything else is perfume.
- We Are Chaos
But the next video, featuring Norman Reedus of The Boondock Saints and The Walking Dead fame, and Manson’s now wifey Lindsay Usich, transported me back in time.
I was that troubled little kid again, watching Manson ride a black pig while swinging a cowboy hat willy-nilly on my little TV. I was just so happy to see him, still rocking - and I mean fucking rocking - out with a killer fucking song.
If tonight lasts forever
it won’t matter
if there’s no tomorrow
- Don’t Chase the Dead
Dripping in autumn vibes, ‘Don’t Chase the Dead’ is the perfect song for any drive or walk on a fall night. It captures that youthful, eerie excitement that still creeps up on even the gnarliest curmudgeon from time to time.
Distinct acoustic rocker strumming ends this stunning collection of songs.
Like staring out of a hungover dawn window into an empty field, the start of the song comes face to face with facts. By the swollen end, the track blossoms into grim acceptance and turns away from that lonely window, unreconciled and broken.
I am a needle
dig in your grooves
scratch you up
then I’ll put you away
I’ll never ever play you again.
- Broken Needle
This is the fitting ultimate track for this album, especially considering the firestorm that swept over Manson after its release.
Evan Rachel Wood’s allegations had been brewing for years and the admissions of Manson himself about the toxicity of their relationship only turned those sparks into a conflagration that shredded his empire. His label, Loma Vista, dropped him. The Shudder Creepshow series that my then girlfriend was making me watch scrapped his episode. This really pissed me off because I thought the show sucked dick and this was the only thing giving me hope whilst trapped watching it with my horror anthology loving girl.
Of course social media sided with the female.
Of course. What do you expect? It’s bizarre, because if someone points at you and claims you did something wrong, it’s natural to expect people to doubt you for a moment. But to 100% believe the accuser with no evidence is preternaturally vile and frightening. As I mentioned above, the release of Heaven Upside Down found me jamming it eastwards toward Massachusetts to visit Salem. How fitting a comparison of the average 21st century social media consumer to the commoner puritan denizen back in 1692.
Back then you just pointed and screamed, “Witch.” Everyone dropped what they were doing and assumed it was so. Now, you point and scream, “Abuser!” And everyone clicks Unfollow and/or shoots hateful comments your way. Your business ventures are forced to cut ties. Friends and associates distance themselves. If you haven’t been financially savvy, you might end up broke. But hopefully not so broke that you cannot retain a good legal team. Because just like in the 17th century, public shunning isn’t shit compared to the legal assailment that may befall you and is the core motive for present day accusations.
Unfortunately for the Salem ‘witches’ back in 1692-1693, there was no logical minded lawyer to walk into the courtroom and say, “Your honor, witches aren’t real.”
If one had, they’d been strung up too. Such as today, when anyone tries to defend someone accused of some heinous thing. The defender of the accused will be labeled an ‘apologist’ and something will probably be dredged up about them too. And off with their heads as well.
So the shunning could be endurable, but Mr. Manson has been investigated by the LA County Sheriff’s Department for quite some time over these allegations. And that is something where having evidence, something provable, should be required. Certainly that is not the case regarding public opinion. Frighteningly, though, it’s also not required to have proof in court either. You just have to convince twelve other people that the accuser is telling the truth.
For example, Google the amount of ‘rapists’ who’ve been exonerated after DNA evidence proved that their accusers falsified their accounts. It’s not only staggering, it’s sickening.
But more than that, it’s frightening. That so many different people, predominantly white females in this specific demographic concerning accused persons, inculpate men of sexually attacking them and are then later discovered to be lying makes you question the foundation of society.
That so many women could not only destroy a man out of a vicious need for revenge but also spit in the face of actual assault victims who are seeking help but facing pushback because of the rampant bogus claimants really puts things into perspective.
Because no one on earth is intimating that these types of crimes do not occur regularly. The issue is attention seekers and rage-filled antagonists muddying the waters of honesty and making it almost completely indiscernible as to who is telling the truth versus who isn’t. Forensic science has demonstrably shown time and again that an accuser’s word is not indisputable.
When the life and reputation of another person is on the line, a degree of incredulity must be placed on the scales of justice, regardless of whose feelings get hurt.
So many innocent people become victims with the pointing of liar’s finger. Equally culpable are the many who are so eager to believe the first person to say, ‘Abuse.’
I’ve always believed Manson.
I’ve sat around patiently for evidence of his guilt. I’ve seen nothing to convince me of him being anything but a drug enthusiast, sexually adventurous, iconoclastic rock and roller who took a little David Bowie and a little Alice Cooper and a little Monroe and a little Charlie and made this interesting cultural figure that more than accomplished his mission of making people question morality, nationalism, politics and especially religion. What was cool about Manson’s latest effort, We Are Chaos, is that it broke away from all that and just focused on straight up T-Rex infectious, raucous rocking. A new direction, which was bound to lead down unlimited roads. Very exciting to a fanatic like me.
And then all this shit. Same shit - different drug-happy celebrity weirdo fucking up and dating a truculent blonde.
Well, fuck. I guess we just have to hang out and see how this goes. Because I’m a fan regardless. I believe in Mr. Manson. I still rock his music, I rock his shirts. But more importantly, I still rock what he taught that little lost and confused teenager back in 1996.
Over the years, my mother eventually grew to appreciate several Manson tracks.
Decades later, she confessed to enjoying his cover of Soft Cell’s 1981 new wave classic ‘Tainted Love’. Before she died, she really got into the John Wick movies, of all things, which featured Manson on the soundtrack. A part of her gradually understood that, despite his image and beliefs, this strange guy from Ohio may very well have saved her son during very tough times in his formative years. So for that, and for the fact that the man just has incredible music, she gave him a shot. And the goth part of her that, as a young woman, loved The Doors and The Damned couldn’t resist liking a little Marilyn too. Regardless of what Jesus thought about it. My mom was able to see between the good and the evil of things. Gradually, she set judgment aside, looked at the full picture and formed her own opinion. She was different like that. And I inherited that from her. Along with some bad ass musical taste.
I’ve always been a different kind of person.
I’m weird looking. I’m a social wasp. I stick out in the not so best ways. But I have to be me. And I’m going to be. The world wants you to get down on your knees and beg its forgiveness for the tiniest infraction of being yourself. But Beat literature and rock music like Manson’s taught me you don’t have to worship the world. You are your own church.
To bring this sermon to an end, I’ll leave with the Reverend’s own words.
In light of the June 1st 2022 Depp/Heard ruling, I find these lyrics a fitting way to conclude this and I hope to see a similar outcome for any Warner/Wood trial to come.
So you wear your damage on your sleeve
but don’t worry
it’s all just tongue in cheek
Not a victim of fashion
More fascist than vogue
cuz victim is chic, yeah
you’re as famous as your pain
victim is chic, yeah
If you conjure the devil
You better make sure
You got a bed for him to sleep in
- Perfume
If you or someone you know has been falsely accused of a crime, seek immediate legal counsel and visit these websites to understand your rights: