Marilyn Manson, we hardly knew ye
Thursday, October 6, 2005 at 7:35PMWhat the hell happened to this guy?!?!?!? The God of Fuck has a greatest hits record out!?!?!? Even better, it's called Lest We Forget
But of course, that's entirely worth debating. The nay-sayers (among which I once counted myself), saw his whole persona as a giant sham and bamboozlement. With every album, he was a new character (the Antichrist Superstar, the asexual Bowie-like worm, the bogeyman pederast, etc...); he had no soul of his own, and it was all just the light-fantastic theater with an eye for making a few bucks.
His own self-righteousness about religion, sex, drugs, rockandroll, satanism—all carefully marketed to disaffected youth with enough extra income to shell out for his latest dark foray into the American pop-landscape--seemed to be just the icing on the cake of this assholes fakery. And all of us who despised him did so because the music we listened to was pure—the artists we loved were not shills trying to make a buck, or putting on campy shock-theater for a quick diversion in our lives. No, they were making real music, with real emotions, and they were the people we should be supporting. Manson was a travesty against all that.
What the nay-sayers didn't realize, and what I eventually came to see, was that that was the whole fucking point. Manson's whole credo, borrowed from LeVay Satanism and Nietzsche's amorality, but extending back to the 18th and 19th century Hegelians, was that all Gods that humans worship are false. We give them powers, we elevate them beyond ourselves, we anthropormorphize them with human characteristics. In some cases, we even make one of us into one of them, and the new gods are celebrities, politicians, the Smiley faces on TV, and definitely our rock stars. How much time does Dave Matthews, or Jet, or whoever else, spend choosing what ragged T-shirts they wear before a gig every night? How is that any different than Manson's preening around onstage in bondage gear? At least that's entertaining! And he was just being honest—he was out to make money, but at least he told us so. He was so over-the-top that everyone else's shilling was revealed along with him. And we bought his records even though we new it was phony—we revelled in finally being able to laugh at the phoniness of being a false god.
So part of Manson's genius was marketing, but the other part was his clear vision of the hypocrisy of dualistic morality. America has always seen itself as the greatest nation in the world. We were a ''City on the Hille'' for the Puritans, and have been so ever since—a shining example of the glory of Heaven manifested on Earth, the place that all other nations would look to for guidance, the great redeemer of the folly of Monarchy. America is a land predicated on fundamental (fundamentalist?) ideas about good and evil, right and wrong, yes and no. As late as the 1980s, Reagan called the Soviet Union, the seemingly only other alternative to the United States in the world, the ''Evil Empire.'' This language is all around us, and it’s one of the structuring principles of our countries sense of itself. The United States and its leaders are “good”, and somebody or something else is Evil. Communism was evil, terrorism is evil, evolution is evil, Marilyn Manson is evil.
Who sets the terms? Who decides what is evil and what is good? Manson recognized that that power has been commandeered by the false gods of the world: politicians, celebrities, pop stars, whoever else is in the news this week. He japed at it, danced around the stage in smoke and fire, laughing at the audicity of people who think they have a right to decide what side of the line we should all stand on. He used the symbols and trappings that had been defined as evil: fascism, hedonism, vulgar sexuality, and used them as a platform to defend the right of people to decide on their own, or together, what right and wrong should be, and not have it dictated to them by some false god.
But he never went the step beyond. This was a man who, in the 1990s, was paid by state legislatures not to play his music within their borders. As Jello Biafra said ''Nice work if you can get it.'' He was a ''poster child of fear'': the favorite target of the Christian right, who accused him of all manner of deviant acts, supposedly ''responsible'' for the Columbine massacre, subject of congressional hearings on music and violence the likes of which we haven't seen since the halycon days of the PMRC. He was the scariest man in America, everything “evil”, as defined by the false gods.
But what if he had showed up at a Christian anti-abortion rally? What if he had given money to GWBush's presidential campaign (''I'd like to thank Karl Rove, Kenny-boy Lay, and Marilyn Manson for making this all possible'')? What if he had run for congress as a republican on a family values platform (he's apparently a registered republican, so he'd at least know how send out the right leaflets)? If he really believed, as he often professed, in the falsehood of dualistic values, why didn't he cast himself further into splitting that falsehood wide open for all to see, when he was at the height of his powers? The tight dualism of “us and them” that pervades our language, politics, and policy today might be a little less destructive if we could all laugh at it.
Well, he's just a pop-star after all, maybe I expected too much. In the prosperous Clinton 90s, he was the scariest enemy the false gods could concoct. But of course, simmering under that shining happiness was all of the rage and strife that we had inflicted on the world to get at that prosperity, that bubbled up and scalded us on September 11th and since then in Iraq. Of course Manson's irrelevant now—he's scary in a cartoonish kind of way, but Al Qaeda, and their Western counterparts, the lumbering juggernaut called the neoconservatives, are way scarier, and unlike Manson, they're fully interested in martialling dualistic morality for the purposes of achieving power.
Reader Comments (3)
nicely written, although i disagree with half of what you say. You kind of miss the whole point of what Manson was supposed to be. Of course he is a pop-star! His whole goal was to GET INSIDE the pop world. But tell me, what other artist are as you say "real music, with real emotion"? I dont know if many bands get any better than the persona of Manson and his often-misenterpreted music. I have to agree that I dont really know his motive for releasing Lest We Forget, hell I dont even own the damn CD. What other musician do we have out there, that challanges morals and has achieved half of what he has done? True musicians? Who the hell could you mean? I am against worshipping false gods, rockstars and holy gods alike. After all, he got what he wanted out of you; a reaction. People need some sort of god, the idiots need gods to be led. Obviously it seems yours dissapointed you. You didnt dissapoint him though.
You know, at least he expressed his views in a manner that got some real attention, that fired up people.
A great majority of his fans are idiots, I dont see his career as a failure at all.
by the way, how did you supposedly found he is registered as republican?
"here is some actual words from the man himself in 2000 "I'm not a politician, though my take on politics is simple: They'll tell you what they think you want to hear just to get elected. I always ignored American politics because I simply don't believe in what politicians say. I don't believe in their promises. I think they lie. All they want is to get elected. Think about why they do what they do. And think about why somebody wants to be president. It's the power, not the people they care for. Even in the music business or the film industry, there are far less lies than there are in politics. "
-marilyn manson, 2000
Hell, I dont know what if what you expected from him could even happen. Mayeb you expect too much from musicians.
Sorry, I should've made myself more clear. i think we're on the same page about this, but just to be specific--I should've put the word "pure" in quotes, along with " real music". My whole initial reaction to manson was predicated on the idea that he was a shill and I listened to "the real stuff", but it was an important revelation for me that he knew that better than I did and that I was the one being shilled if I thought that the musicians I cared about weren't putting on an act. I should probably clean the piece up and make it more clear. Thanks for the comments though.
Re: the republican thing. I actually heard it somewhere I can no longer remember, but you can read about it http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=20853" rel="nofollow">here.This site claims he isn't registered, but that he endorsed GWB. So I dunno... supposedly there's a 2000 interview w/ Tucker Carlson floating around somewhere that documents this.