Straight outta hell by way of Florida, Marilyn Manson leads an army of lost boys into the 21st century.
By Jeffrey Rotter.
Hell might be for children, but on this particular Halloween, Asbury Park, New Jersey, is running a close second. A derelict seaside resort an hour's drive from New York City, this string of boarded-up corn dog stands and wasted art-nouveau theaters is as good a setting as any to wait out the end of a millennium.
It's 2 P.M., a scant 27,754 hours before the turn of the century, and I'm idling behind a convoy of soccer moms in Volvo station wagons, their kids anxious to shed the 'rents and greet their fellow Marilyn Manson fanatics. The band's legion of Goth-come-latelies, a.k.a. "Spooky Kids," are dressed to impress, attired, Trekkie-style, after a favorite band member. In line in front of me, a carload of little Twiggys, dressed in the bassist's soiled tartan skirt and pigtails, bid Mom a grudging farewell and rush to the box office. On the curb beside them, a wee Pogo strokes his peach-fuzz Fu Manchu. A pair of Marilyn Mansons lean against the tour bus.
If Asbury Park is the picture of an old leisure establishment in decay, then Marilyn Manson -- Manson, bassist Twiggy Ramirez, keyboardist Madonna Wayne Gacy (alias Pogo), drummer Ginger Fish, and new guitarist Zim Zum -- are just the opposite, decay turned into leisure. Manson's mad concoction of shock theater, Nine Inch Nails-derived techno-Goth, and Satan- inspired daily affirmations have found their mark in the vast, bepimpled ear of adolescent America. Spooky shit in the ignoble tradition of Alice Cooper, Glenn Danzig, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the band's second full-length release, Antichrist Superstar, arrived on the Billboard Top 200 at No. 3. MTV loves Manson, as does director David Lynch, who cast him as a seedy porno star in his new film, Lost Highway. Conservative watchdogs Bill Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker despise Manson, accusing Antichrist's distributor, MCA, of "peddling filth for profits." As for Manson himself, he's pleased to be of service: "There's so many people who wouldn't even have a job if they didn't have a bad guy to fool around with."
Like many kids, Marilyn Manson, ne Brian Warner, discovered the escapism of rock at a Sunday-school backmasking lecture. He found all his future idols there: Kiss, Alice Cooper, the Beatles, David Bowie. "When they said, 'You shouldn't listen to this,' "recalls Manson, "I wanted to know why."
Born to a working-class family in Canton, Ohio, Manson suffered a typically awkward Christian- school youth. "I didn't have a good time," he winces. "I had bad acne. I was really skinny. The jock kids loved to beat the shit out of me. I didn't have a clique to fit into. That's probably why I relate to my fans so much."
Sunday school also skewed Manson against Christian authority. Still, for a would-be Satan, Manson can be downright righteous. "People are very surprised to hear me say that a lot of my values are Christian values," says the Bible-quoting Manson, whose own twist on "love thy neighbor" adds the conditional "unless they deserve to be destroyed." "I think that's part of my shock. I just don't like the way that Christianity combined with the influence of television has bred a nation of weakness."
The standard-bearer of moral "weakness" for Manson was his own grandfather, whose taste for enemas, bestial porn, and toy trains left deep scars. "He had this train set in his basement," remembers Manson, "and whenever he turned it on, it was to mask the sound of his masturbating. I would tell my parents, but nobody believed me. He was the one who convinced me that things that were supposed to be pure and American were not."
Manson split the hypocrisy of home for Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at 18, for a college track in journalism. In 1990, he met guitarist Daisy Berkowitz, and the two founded Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids, a drum machine-driven four-piece performance-art group. When Nine Inch Nails was on a club tour of Florida, Manson interviewed Trent Reznor for his college newspaper and they exchanged phone numbers. A few slots opening for NIN followed. Later that year, Manson got a call from Reznor: "Trent called me just after his Broken album was finished and asked if I wanted to be in a NIN video," Manson says, still relishing his stroke of good fortune. "We went to the Sharon Tate house for the shoot, and while I was there, he told me he wanted us to be the first band on his new label."
The band's first album, Portrait of an American Family, and breakthrough EP, Smells Like Children, had aspirations about as low as Grandpa Manson's: a little shock schmaltz, a few coy jabs at tabloid culture, and a cheesy Eurythmics cover. Manson had grander, nastier ideas, but they needed more stately mansions than the band alone could build. With Reznor (a coproducer of all the band's material) taking a more active role, Antichrist Superstar is the fulfillment of the band's operatic promise.
On Antichrist, Reznor bigs up the Manson like he's remixing the Nibelungenlied, downspiraling dense horror-rock through a riotous digital din. "I wanted to show that the band had some scope, that it wasn't all guitar-bass-drums," Reznor says. "If you make a whole album of 200 b.p.m. songs, after about three minutes, it's not scary anymore." The result is a well-paced, organic, and yes, scary concept album that casts Manson as a lowly worm who becomes a rock'n'roll Antichrist and destroys the world. For Manson, the album appeals to "the element of everybody's personality that is nihilistic and hopeless, and decides that, rather than come to a solution (to the world's problems), things should be brought to an end."
But the Antichrist isn't such a Gloomy Gus after all. The "up" side to Manson is a downright sunny call for kids to reject Christianity and "be their own gods." It's a philosophy that, unfortunately, takes its cues from Satanism and Nietzsche. "Satanism," says Manson, "if it was packaged differently...." It would be Scientology? "Yeah, exactly." Manson believes his fans are "selling their souls to themselves. They're forming their own values and their own morals based on what makes them happy, not on what makes their parents happy." Which makes him--what?-- Kids Are People Too in a bodice and jackboots?
It's nearly 11:00 P.M. at the Asbury Park Theater and the crowd is so wound-up, they could mosh to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And that's just what they do. When the familiar balloon of the Oompa-Loompa theme springs from the P.A., signaling the Reverend's arrival, the joint erupts. Manson still looks a little ill at ease from a bomb threat that delayed the show some two hours, but makes no reference to it until late in the set. As the band bashes out the last measures of Tourniquet -- one of the keenest measures of teen worthlessness since Alice Cooper's I'm Eighteen -- Manson's mind is on the bomb: "How many of you came here to see me die tonight?" The crowd, not quite getting it, responds in the affirmative. Manson looks bummed, but all this ties in nicely with his messiah trip. "No matter how much they love you, they want a tragedy," he says later.
Marilyn Manson, philosopher? No, worse. Try preacher. The scariest moment of the night -- scarier, in some ways, than the bomb threat -- is the church revival/Nazi rally that accompanies Antichrist Superstar, the fist-pumper that signals the Antichrist's ascension. The lights come up to a nervous martial beat, and illuminate a massive pulpit draped in the Antichrist's emblem, a swastika-fied variation on the electric-shock warning symbol. Dressed in a Swaggart- cut leisure suit, twitching like an Eva Peron marionette, Manson leads his band through a totalitarian slapstick routine that's equal parts tele-evangelist, statesman, and rock star. His reich'n'roll is a little Kampf and a little camp, recycling agit-props from Pink Floyd's bong classic The Wall, Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.
The routine is a scathing parody and a sincere scare, both. Regrettably, Manson is ill-equipped or unwilling to resolve the contradiction. "It's the study of how people make rock'n'roll totalitarian," says Manson, waxing academic. "But it's also a call to arms. It's a pep rally for the apocalypse." This is the scary part of Manson, and of rock at large: For all its promise of individual rebellion, "think for yourself" is not a message that goes platinum. But try telling that that to the little Mansons camped out by the tour bus.
Early the next morning the bomb still hasn't exploded, and, despite radio broadcasts to the contrary, Manson is still ticking. We're sitting in the suite atop the Berkeley Carteret Hotel, in the same room that Johnny Cash used decades ago, and Manson is looking more like Brian Warner than I've ever seen him. "There's days when I'd love for everybody to realize that things have gone too far, and that we need to be born again so that we can appreciate the little things." Manson pauses to look at the television that is always on, even when he sleeps. "Then there's other days when I think the world deserves to be destroyed. Why should I help anybody? Everybody's stepped on me my whole life. I've put on this crown," he sighs, "but I'm not sure if I want it."
