God Save The Pale Emperor
“It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they have a lot of information in front of them. They can see that they are living in a world that’s made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea that you could turn and run and start something better. But now America has become one big mall, and because of the Internet and all of the technology we have, there’s nowhere to run. People are the same everywhere. Sometimes music, movies and books are the only things that let us feel like someone else feels like we do. I’ve always tried to let people know it’s OK, or better, if you don’t fit into the program. Use your imagination — if some geck from Ohio can become something, why can’t anyone else with the willpower and creativity?”
- Marilyn Manson, “Columbine: Whose Fault Is It?”
Rolling Stone, June 24th, 1999
I had originally intended to write a 20-year retrospective on the release of Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar over this past summer, but like the best laid plans of mice and men, I never did get around to making it happen, despite taking copious notes in preparation for it. But today is Marilyn Manson’s birthday, and I would be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to salvage those notes into something serviceable with which to celebrate the birth of the world’s last great and truly dangerous rockstar, and his impact upon the world.
The first concert I ever attended without parental supervision was Marilyn Manson and Spitkiss at the Edge nightclub in Palo Alto on January 28th, 1995. They had just come off of their seminal tour with Nine Inch Nails and The Jim Rose Circus, and were on the first leg of their first big solo tour for Portrait Of An American Family, which along with album’s like Korn’s self-titled effort and Tool’s Undertow had become my new American gospel.
As bitter, angry, sexually confused fifteen-year-old from a broken home, bereft of faith or direction or guidance, Manson’s gleeful, theatrical nihilism and his razor-sharp critique of American suburbia really spoke to me at the time, as it did to millions of disaffected teenage youth across the nation at the time. And like them, when I saw my prophet face-to-face for the first time, it changed my life forever.
Stripped down to a leather thong and knee-high black boots, with long, greasy black hair only barely concealing the maniacal glint in his eye, he shimmied and screamed and crooned his way through a blisteringly hot set for an audience that was, by all accounts, as unhinged as he was. The mosh pit barely stopped between songs, and no one stopped cheering for the entire performance.
At one point, Manson dragged myself and two dozen other kids on stage at to hang out on all the couches they had placed there for a while, only to have us line up and stage dive en masse after a couple of songs. The show was a truly orgiastic display of rage and sex and love and hate that left us all spent, secure in the knowledge that whatever demons lie within us could sleep, if only for a time.
Twiggy Ramirez (bass), Madonna Wayne Gacy (keys).
At the time, bands like Nirvana and Alice In Chains and Soundgarden were creating moody, morose overtones that tended towards bitter introspection and relentless navel-gazing, which ultimately made them darlings of the more art-nouveau, hipster side of alternative music; Manson and Company just wanted to tear all of that horseshit down. Spawning out of Florida’s death metal scene, they were looking to scare people. They wanted to piss people off. And above all, they wanted to warn people of the growing rot under America’s floorboards, where generations of piss and shit and vomit from Sarah Palin’s “right-wingin’, bitter-clingin’, proud-clingers” threatened to bubble up and poison us all.
Onstage, Marilyn Manson were unfocused, they were outrageous, and they were exactly what my generation needed at the time. But it was offstage when America found out just how dangerous Marilyn Manson was. No once in alternative rock since Jello Biafra had been able to so precisely articulate the struggles of their contemporaries quite like Manson himself could. He is exceptionally well-read, a gifted speaker, and possessed of a sardonic wit that could skewer nearly critic with deadly precision.
But where Biafra wanted to use his platform to agitate for social change (and did so quite well, and all the way to Capitol Hill, no less), it was sufficient — if not more effective — for Manson to hold up a mirror to America and show the nation what a sick, sad, pathetic thing it had become, puffed up on false morality and addicted to delusions of grandeur and mythology that were destroying it from within. “This is your world in which we grow,” Manson growls in the band’s cover of Patti Smith’s iconic Rock ’n’ Roll Nigger. “And we have grown to hate you.”
Manson was also the first real multimedia star, very consciously taking advantage of opportunities to connect with fans and get messages out that no one else did, nor really could have. His numerous appearances on daytime talk shows like Phil Donahue might seem like they were merely intended to provide stay-at-home-moms and the perennially unemployed with something to point and gawk and get mad at, but the thousand middle fingers Manson tossed at the legions of Bible-thumpers and flag-sucking nationalists who opposed him echoed in the hearts and minds of their millions of teenage children, who saw things in Manson that they saw in themselves, the same things that their parents hated and feared so much.
No major media celebrity has even come close to connecting with queer youth across America in such a widespread, meaningful way ever since, with the possible exception of Lady Gaga. Yet, her direct overtures, while impactful, seem reductive by comparison for their specificity. Manson’s freakshow tent was (and still is) big enough for everyone.
And as someone who was clearly very aware of his celebrity status and the massive impact he was having on popular culture, for Marilyn Manson to write and publish an autobiography was still a dangerous gambit. But it turned out to be the icing on the Cake And Sodomy, so to speak. The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell is an intensely revealing book, where Manson talks about the dark and traumatic experiences that shaped his upbringing. For someone so publicly inscrutable to open themselves up in such a fashion was a stroke of genius, endearing his fans to him even further and cementing his legacy for years to come.
1999’s Columbine High School shooting would do much to tarnish that legacy, when it was revealed that shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were allegedly big fans of Manson’s music, which turned out to not even be true. It didn’t matter, and it never does; the Morality Police had their bogeyman, and they threw every ounce of scorn and derision and fear and loathing they had at him. Despite going on to release several successful albums, Manson’s career never properly recovered in the wake of Columbine, and his impact on pop culture began to fade as a new generation of artists — artists Manson had paved the way for — rushed into fill the gap.
Kurt Cobain is widely heralded as the voice of my generation, but Marilyn Manson ultimately did something much more important: he gave my generation its own voice, along the courage to use it. In his own perverse way, he gave us hope, by showing us just how hopeless things had become, and by fostering a rage against the dying light that had not existed in decades.
Two decades after the release of Antichrist Superstar, nearly everything Manson spoke upon at the time has either come true or become ascendant in American culture, leaving the cultural landscape ripe for another person of his stature to come along and pick up where he left off. Is such a thing even possible today? It’s difficult to say. But that doesn’t make it any less necessary. Meanwhile, Manson and his music and his showmanship and fearlessness will continue to serve as a blueprint for great and truly dangerous rockstardom, waiting for the future to catch up.
This article originally appear on Pink Elephants on January 5th, 2017. For more Pink Elephants, click here.
