Marilyn Manson
Every few years, like
clockwork, the pop-music industry presents to the American public for its
delectation a rock star so base, so vile, so offensive to common decency, that
he must be stifled. Once upon a time, the monster was Ozzy Osbourne, bat eater.
More recently, it has been Twisted Sister, 2 Live Crew, Snoop Doggy Dog, and
Nine Inch Nails. But this summer's designated villain outdoes them all. Marilyn
Manson, who lends his adopted name to his band, is a minister in the Church of
Satan, the self-proclaimed "Antichrist Superstar," and the perfect cartoon
fiend. Already this year concert halls in Alaska, Idaho, Texas, and
Massachusetts have canceled Manson shows, while South Carolina has paid Manson
$40,000 not to play. In recent weeks, the band has had to threaten a
lawsuit in order to perform in Richmond, Va., and has filed a lawsuit in order
to perform in New Jersey. Utah has blacklisted Manson because he once shredded
a Mormon Bible onstage, and Christian groups picket outside every venue he
plays.
They have
picked an easy target. Marilyn Manson plays music that is called, depending on
who's doing the calling, "death metal," "industrial," "gothic," "glam metal,"
"shock rock," or "sleazy industro-crunch." Or, perhaps most accurately:
13-Year-Old White Boy music--the kind of sonic pollution that no one but a boy
high on testosterone could enjoy. What this means is huge, distorted guitar
noise, a thumping backbeat, lots of screechy fuzz, and vocals that are usually
droned, occasionally screamed or hissed. It also means ferocious lyrics:
Manson's songs are a foul stew of obscenity, violence, Satanism, scatology,
anti-Christian invective, sadomasochism, and suicide. For example:
I am
the god of Fuck ...Cash in hand and dick on screen, who said god was ever
clean? Bible-belt round Anglo-waste [ sic ], putting sinners in their
place. Yeah, right, great. If you're so good explain the shit stains on your
face.
The 28-year-old Manson's public image is as creepy as his
music. He and fellow band members have adopted female pop icons' first names
and murderers' last names (my favorite: Madonna Wayne Gacy). Manson, whose
given name is Brian Warner, cakes his face with alabaster makeup and wears
androgynous, ragged leather clothes. He looks like the Grim Reaper after a
nasty motorcycle accident. His concerts are frenzied: He lacerates his chest
with broken bottles, rips Bibles apart, and uses an American flag as toilet
paper. The band's videos are filled with freakish images of medical oddities.
Its T-shirts are decorated with pentagrams and slogans like "Kill God, Kill
Your Mom and Dad, Kill Yourself." Needless to say, kids eat this up. The most
recent album, Antichrist Superstar , debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard
charts and has sold more than 1 million copies. (The album was released by--of
course--Interscope Records, the label that brought you Snoop Doggy Dog, Tupac
Shakur, and Nine Inch Nails.) Any male under 40 knows, of course, that Marilyn
Manson isn't the first band to combine horror-movie imagery, crude
theatricality, and anti-social lyrics--Black Sabbath did it in the '70s, and
Mötley Crüe did it in the '80s. But Manson is more horrible, more crude,
more theatrical, and more anti-social than any of its antecedents.
And more
ridiculous. You wouldn't think that anyone could take this kind of rock
grandiosity seriously after seeing This Is Spinal Tap , but they do.
Rolling Stone champions Manson as the conscience of American music:
"Never has there been a rock star quite as complex as Marilyn Manson." Never?
Manson is lionized for speaking the "truths" that no one wants to hear: that
Christianity is false, that conventional morality is stifling, and so on. No
one takes Manson's philosophizing more seriously than Manson himself. "Rock 'n'
roll was dangerously close to becoming completely boring until Marilyn Manson
came along," he said in a recent interview.
Unlike earlier shock rockers such as Dee Snider
of Twisted Sister or Gene Simmons of Kiss, Manson isn't a jokester. He honestly
believes himself to be "Marilyn Manson," the embodiment of the world's great
opposites--man and woman, icon and villain, Christ and Satan. He believes, too,
that his music has deep social significance. He cites his intellectual
influences to reporters--Nietzsche, Darwin, Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, the Bible,
Anton LeVay--and delivers the kind of muddled rants that adolescents mistake
for wisdom. In his newsletter, for example, he writes: "We are America's shit
and they should be ashamed of what they have eaten. Fortunately you have
received this in time to escape the encroaching HOLOCAUST of fascist christian
[ sic ] morality."
Not
surprisingly, the Christian Coalition, the Catholic League, and the American
Family Association have taken up arms against Manson. The silly, juvenile
rocker vs. the prudish, humorless censors. You want both sides to lose.
Earlier battles over offensive music were fought on
television and in print. But the Manson fight is shaping up as one of the
Internet's first great Kulturkampfs . The Gulf Coast branch of the AFA
posted "affidavits" about Manson concerts on its Web site. The affidavits
claimed that Manson passes out bags of drugs to his audiences, that he raped a
dog onstage, had anal and oral sex onstage, threw puppies and kittens into the
crowd to be torn apart, and led Satanic services that included a "virgin
sacrifice." The affidavits also attest that he watched friends stab a woman to
death and bathe in her blood. E-mailed around the country, the affidavits
galvanized ministers and Christian Coalition members to organize protests and
demand concert cancellations.
The Manson
band and its fans have retaliated in kind. The band is threatening to sue the
AFA for libel and defamation. (The Gulf Coast AFA has yanked the affidavits off
its site.) Manson fans have parodied the Gulf Coast page and organized their
own online "Portrait of an American Family Association," which takes its name
from a Manson album. There are dozens of POAAFA chapter Web sites, some of
which counteract the false affidavits by publishing concert-goers' accounts of
Manson shows (glass laceration, no sex).
The Manson fight is a morality play in which
everyone wins. The decency folks get to make headlines, shock consciences, and
stop concerts. Manson gets to paint himself as a First Amendment martyr and
keep selling records. The good times won't last. The shelf life of preteen
bands is measured in months. When the censors and parents stop complaining, the
kids will stop listening, and the band will fade away.
But there may be some
consolation for Marilyn Manson himself. Here it is instructive to remember
Alice Cooper, the musician to whom Manson owes most. A quarter century ago,
Cooper sold the same kind of horror show to his teen fans as Manson does now: a
gender-bending female name, pancake makeup, raucous music, an onstage
guillotine, and preposterous gross-out legends. (Cooper allegedly filled
balloons with live worms, released them above the audience, then popped them,
showering fans with night crawlers.) Cooper was condemned, reviled and, for a
brief time, incredibly popular. In recent years he's made a revival. He played
himself, campily, in Wayne's World . He draws thousands of fans to his
goofy, self-consciously bombastic concerts. Marilyn Manson is darker, more
serious, and more vicious than Alice Cooper was. Even so, you can imagine a
comeback in 2017: shredding Bibles to a laugh track.
