Holy writ

Marilyn Manson speaks

by Carly Carioli

In the signature moment of Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar tour -- a moment he's kept a part of his act and replayed innumerable times since -- he'd get up behind an oversized podium dressed like a dictator or a deacon or Nick Cave, tough to tell, and behind him would unfurl these long columns of black and crimson festooned with a lightning-bolt insignia that bore more than a little resemblance to Nazi regalia. At the podium, singing, Manson would make of himself an orator and a puppet, first enunciating in dramatic fashion, with pointing fingers, and then suddenly swinging limp over the front of the podium, as if the puppeteer's strings had been quietly snipped. These were easy symbols, and they'd been hallmarks of metal elocution since forever: a decrying of religion as fascism, a resistance to authority at its most Satanic. But the choruses were something different. If you stood at the back of the auditorium and watched the crowd shout along, and the man leading the chant at the podium, you could feel you'd been dropped into a Leni Riefenstahl film. If you were unsure of the singer's motivation, or his irony, it might have made your skin crawl.

And here was where most people split on Manson -- was he simply fishing for shock value, or was he attempting something far more subversive by forcing his audience to acknowledge its own fascist tendencies in the face of a rock-and-roll demagogue? What you thought of that single moment of Manson's performance was likely to mirror your view of him in general. Either he was a hypocrite and a phony (that was my take at the time) or he was, at the dawn of his career, acknowledging that he was already becoming the very thing he despised, and that he was intent on self-destruction. Or self-promotion. At that moment the two motives seemed almost analogous.

When I spoke to Marilyn Manson a month ago, Ralph Nader had not yet revealed himself as the liberal Antichrist, the new Man Who Sold the World; and Cher had not yet taken over as the nation's pop-music blasphemer laureate for a song of hers depicting the nuns of the order of the Sisters of Mercy as a bunch of heartless wenches. (Has anyone, by the way, ever seen Cher and Manson in the same room?) But there were other signs that Manson's outrage was becoming, as all outrages must, passé. Two words: Slim Shady.

The mainstream catches up, and then again it doesn't. It may never catch up to Columbine, which is in Manson's mind the tell-tale symptom of the turn-of-the-century zeitgeist, as potent a totem as the murders overseen by the man whose name he has taken for his own. After Columbine, a whole host of half-baked assumptions and anxieties about ostensibly normal American teenagers were given enormous weight. High schools have become significantly more repressive environments. Columbine legitimized the affectations of alienation acted out by both Manson and his spooky-kid followers as surely as Kurt Cobain's suicide legitimized Nirvana's existential angst. In doing so, it may also have made Manson redundant; his fiction can no longer compete with reality. He can only attempt to explain, and to represent.

So it's understandable if the weariness in his voice was not simply the result of a long day of phone interviews to promote his new Holy Wood: In the Shadow of the Valley of Death, a work that completes the triptych he began with Antichrist Superstar (the trilogy, he says, should for narrative purposes be considered in reverse order). The new disc, which he supports with a tour that comes to Tsongas Arena in Lowell this Wednesday, is the densest, most theatrical, most ambitious effort by an artist who has made something of a fool of himself by making overly dense, theatrical, and ambitious albums. It follows his surest critical success, Mechanical Animals (all are on Trent Reznor's Nothing label), which was perceived nonetheless as a commercial disappointment, and as something of a stylistic betrayal by his fan base. In that context Holy Wood is largely a return to the dark, coarse, subterranean goth-metal textures of Superstar, except for its two lead singles, "The Fight Song" and "Disposable Teens," which split the difference between the last two albums and in my opinion amount to the finest work in his catalogue.

Those singles also suggest a Manson who has learned to play the industry's game -- give the suits and critics a song or two they can sell and they'll allow him 17 tracks of self-indulgent dramatic exposition tying together Adam and Eve, Jack Kennedy, Christ, the Beatles, alchemy, Woodstock '99, Altamont, and a modern-day fairy tale of such labyrinthian complexity that Manson is planning to publish an expanded version of the story as a novel sometime next year. For all his metaphorical wrangling, though, he's attempting to tell a simple and compelling story about pop music and pop stars, about the ways they fail us and themselves. And also about how, once in a while, they almost don't.

Q: Let's play Who Wants To Be an Antichrist. For a million dollars: the pure products of America go (a) crazy; (b) to Heaven; (c) to Hell; (d) nowhere.
A: The pure products of America would go to a version of Hell, because art, by definition, is supposed to be what most people would call evil. Art challenges the mainstream idea of what is good and moral.

Q: I was fishing for the William Carlos Williams quote; he said the pure products of America go crazy. I thought you might concur; you seem to have a bit to say about what it might feel like to be one of those products.
A: Well, I think in a way you've just nailed a key part of the story line that goes through my three records, starting with Antichrist Superstar. Because Mechanical Animals was really about what it's like to be a product. Seven songs were these grinning, sarcastic anthems that were mocking pop music and referencing pop music; the other seven were about how isolating and lonely it was [to be a pop star]. And that kinda plays into my whole story. Because while all three records make something that is really autobiographical, what happened was that with Antichrist Superstar I projected myself into the position where I sit today. It could've come true or it could've failed to come true, but in my case it did -- it was a story that I had to live out, so in a way the story wrote me. If we start at the beginning, it's a story about someone who is naive and idealistic and thinks that he wants to be a part of this perfect world which doesn't really want him. And in this case Holy Wood is what I've called this perfect world. So you fight and you fight your whole life to fit in, and when you get there you realize that all the people around you are the same people that laughed at you and beat you down in the first place.

So you get pissed off, and your anger starts a revolution. And anyone who starts a revolution -- whether it was Christ or John Kennedy or John Lennon, whoever it was -- thinks he can change the world. And what happens is Holy Wood, or whatever you want to call it for that matter, will take your revolution, turn it inside out, and make it just another product to sell back to you. And then I get to the end of the story, which is Antichrist Superstar, and you're faced with a choice: how do you deal with that? And in my case it was about destroying everything you've become to become something else. Something stronger, hopefully.

This record deals with the beginning, really. It ends up being a part of my novel -- which is told more with characters and places and in more of a proper way -- but on the records I don't want to be burdened by all that. I created a metaphor of a perfect world which is Holy Wood, and also a place of people who aren't accepted which I call Death Valley. I'm very simple -- those are two places that are in my immediate neighborhood, and I made them into metaphorical places. This record is very much about speaking for someone who's from Death Valley and is trying to be a part of Holy Wood -- and the anger and the revolution element of the story. And in a way I think that it addresses the way a lot of people in America feel growing up now. And it addresses how I was treated, and how people on both sides of the Columbine incident felt. I think it just deals with why mankind behaves the way it does. When you're treated like you're worthless, you're gonna treat other people like they're worthless.

Q: Aside from the heat you took -- and I think rational people will always reject a casual association between rock songs and murder -- did Columbine get to you at all? Just as a kind of cultural defining moment?
A: First of all, it was a war that I didn't feel was mine to fight. So I didn't get involved in it, because I felt that the media were creating it from the beginning, from the minute it started happening. For me to speak to the media, or to try to defend myself for something I wasn't guilty of, would just be adding to the problem. So in a genuinely respectful way I tried to stay out of it. There was no publicity to be had, and no exploitation that I wanted to be a part of. But afterward, as I sat down, I really shut myself away from the world for three months to try and decide what I would do, and it ended up being the lyrics for this record. I started to see strong parallels -- and on this album there's a lot of references to the late '60s. I was born in '69, and I saw Woodstock '99 being the same as Altamont; the fact that the Stones recorded Let It Bleed in the house that I live in had a real strong tie to me with making this record; and I saw Columbine as being the equivalent of the Manson murders. So there were a lot of strong parallels for me, and that's when I started thinking about the "White Album," because the "White Album" -- "Helter Skelter" written on the wall and everything -- became one of the first records that was blamed [for violence], so it became a kindred thing for me.

The bottom line was, people kept asking me, "What would you say to any of these kids?" And my response is, "I wouldn't say anything to them. I would listen. And if you were listening, it wouldn't have happened." And that's the point. I think that music, in a way, even though you listen to it, listens to you. Because it has no judgments. It's a place where people find the release of their emotions, whether they're anger or happiness or whatever it is.

Q: And yet the vision of stardom you're representing with Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals seems profoundly unrewarding. Is there any sense of liberation there? Isn't that supposed to be part of the rock-and-roll bargain?
A: I feel a sense of completion, and not just an artistic one. I feel like a true transformation because with any character or metaphor that I create on a record -- even on Mechanical Animals -- I lived that. In a way I could say that if people were talking to me back then, they were talking to this character who was a sarcastic mockery of what a rock star should be. But at the same time, for that year of my life, that's what I was. So it becomes a really fine line between what's real and what's not. I feel now the same way I felt 10 years ago, when I started the band. I have the same enthusiasm, I feel reborn in a way, and I feel that I've accomplished something that I probably don't really understand myself at this point. And now I'm ready to take on the world with it.

But that's -- the answer to your question is no, it's not liberating, because it's like a snake eating it's own tail. It's like the idea that "revolution" is just one more letter than "evolution," and the idea that no matter how far you go, you've only come back to the beginning. I do feel liberated in the sense that I've accomplished this specific thing -- I've finished this album, and in a way I've finished a bigger work. But now I feel that there's only new challenges. I think that the only way you can ever really stay sane -- or crazy, whichever side of the fence you define things by -- is by always being reborn. I think that's a good thing. It may seem overwhelming and it may seem like you can never get far enough along in your evolution, but that's probably the only way you can really stay true to what you are -- just constantly becoming something else. [Laughs]. To be yourself by becoming somebody else.

Marilyn Manson performs this Wednesday, November 22, at Tsongas Arena in Lowell, Massachusetts. Call (617) 931-2000.