Interview:1997/07/25 MANSON

MANSON
Photographs by Anton Corbijn
Interview with Marilyn Manson
Date	July 25, 1997
Source	Entertainment Weekly
Interviewer	Chris Willman

MMMBAD: OUT FROM UNDER HANSON'S FEEL-GOOD ROCK CRAWLS THE BLASPHEMOUS MARILYN MANSON, MOM AND DAD'S WORST NIGHTMARE

"WELCOME TO THE BIBLE BELT, MOTHERF---ERS!"

Or, actually, Giants Stadium in New Jersey - a fairly long way from Oral Roberts country, but Marilyn Manson's point is made. The bellower of this salutation has a way of turning just about any burg into a seeming religious cloister and any authority figure into an archconservative merely by booking a tour date in town. Today, he and his same-named band are tagging along on the Ozzfest tour, even though the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority tried in vain to cancel the show when it realized exactly which self-pro-claimed satanist would be joining reformed bat biter Ozzy Osbourne on the bill. Cooler heads prevailed in the form of a court order, allowing Manson to have his way with 50,000 more young minds this June day.

"They said we weren't gonna play here!" Manson reminds the crowd in a half snarl that sounds particularly well suited to telling priests that their mothers darn socks in hell. Some of the very authorities who tried to stop the show, he adds, are watching from an overhead box. "Why not give 'em a big hello?" The crowd turns around, and a sea of fingers flies in the alleged direction of the would-be censors. Manson can't resist a coup de grâce. "Who won this time, f---head?"

This inevitable upbraiding accomplished, it's back to business as usual - which is not nearly as shocking as Jersey officials might've feared or the kids might've hoped. Manson's menacingly ambisexual garter getup wouldn't stun anyone who has paid attention to pop culture since Dr. Frank N. Furter walked the celluloid earth. He preaches a blend of fatalism, antifascism, Christian bashing, and profane self-determinism (think Ayn Rand and Alice Cooper meeting in a Tourette's syndrome ward). As the set progresses, Manson produces plenty of indelicate and even alarming invective, directed at both society and self ("Why not kill yourselves? You're already dead," he modestly proposes), but doesn't offer much bite to go with the shock-rock bark. Which is to say, the Jersey crowd is missing out on the bestiality, child molestation, mass rape, and other completely mythical stage rites that some gullible religious and political figures have repeated as fact.

Toward the end, he does work in a showstopper, getting behind a pulpit and donning a red shirt and black jacket for some storm-trooping Mussolini shtick - à la Pink Floyd's The Wall - whose irony may be lost on the crowd. Here, during the title song of his platinum-selling Antichrist Superstar, he briefly recalls '80s Christian metal band Stryper as he tosses Bibles out to the crowd... albeit only after ceremonially ripping some pages out. Fortunately for the theatrics, it's a breezy afternoon, and the desecrated Scriptures flutter peacefully for quite a few sunlit seconds before they disappear into the mosh pit.

IS MARILYN MANSON REALLY THE DEVIL? OR DOES HE just play one on MTV?

In 1997, while most pop fans appear primed to give in to the light side of the Force - with a top 10 dominated by wholesome acts like Bob Carlisle or cheerfully saucy ones like the Spice Girls - Manson, the anti-Hanson, remains a potent reminder that not everyone making records wants you to have a nice day.

After debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart last fall, Antichrist Superstar is nearly spent as a commercial force, yet incessant touring in '97 has ensured that the Manson brand name becomes more familiar by the minute. Successions of local governments fly into legislative panics upon learning of Manson's approach, with attempts at cancellations and lively First Amendment debates following. It couldn't go off more like clockwork if Interscope Records (Manson's label) sent an advance man to every city council meeting dressed in a red cape and set of horns.

The latest hot spot is neighboring Canada. Last week, officials in Alberta and Winnipeg banned shows planned for late July in major venues there, and the mayor of Edmonton is trying to do the same. And in response to these brouhahas... well, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, Manson shrugged.

"At this point in the game, I've grown bored with me against the Christians, this whole battle that they've created," he sighs, waxing weary over "having to sedate the city officials and police, telling them this is what I do and this is what I don't do. If they want to ban me, they can." But what's the point of provocation without the morally indignant backlash? "I like to do things of the moment and not be afraid of the repercussions - and sometimes the repercussions are the art," he agrees. "It's not that I've gotten tired of that. I've gotten tired of defending my nature. I don't think a snake or a dog has to defend what he does... It sounds kind of silly - almost a hippie mentality - but I don't see why you can't be in cooperation with nature and accept yourself and not feel guilty. The concept of sin, I think, is a sad idea. It's made a lot of people suffer over the years. Animals don't have the concept of sin. Animals don't ask for forgiveness."

No dog's life for him, though. Manson, 28, is lying back on his bed in a hotel room located at the other end of the Bible belt - in West Hollywood - a few days after Ozzfest's late-June finale. Sunglasses obscure the likely absence of his trademark bizarre mix-and-match contact lenses. A black shirt falls open just enough to reveal a scar across his left breast, apparently from one of Manson's Iggy-like concert-stage self-autopsies. Voice lowered from a Regan-like rasp to a low, disaffected murmur, the former Brian Warner - born in Canton, Ohio, the son of a furniture-salesman dad (and Vietnam vet) and a nurse mom - is profanity-free, articulate, and affable, if not necessarily vying for any humility awards.

Where'd he learn to be this nice? Why, in Christian grammar school, of course where a succession of those infamous seminars in which rock records were played in reverse and examined for "back-masked" demonic messages helped set him on his present course. "I have them to thank for introducing me to Queen, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper... and, uh, Electric Light Orchestra," he laughs.

There he was also introduced to the idea of the Antichrist, "something that terrified me growing up, because there were so many rumors that 1984 was going to be Armageddon and the Antichrist was going to take over America," he says. "It's interesting when you study the literature; the Christians have this concept of the rapture, of Jesus coming and saving everyone at the last minute, but that doesn't really exist in the Bible, and the only time the word Antichrist is mentioned was pertaining to people who opposed Jesus in his early days... So when I got older, I realized that it was something that I wanted to become, not something I was afraid of."

The attraction had less to do with Lucifer per se than liberating himself from religion in order to become a Solo Artist. "In discovering Nietzsche," he continues, "I even felt he kind of foretold the coming of Marilyn Manson. But for me the apocalypse was always about destroying the idea of God on a mental level, not destroying the world physically. Because if you think about it, to Christians, that is the apocalypse, the loss of God and loss of their faith. To me, that's the birth of the individual. So I think it's a positive thing."

And it is radical individualism - with a Nietzchean Überman (or Übergoofus) twist - that's being preached here. But Manson's well-publicized Church of Satan membership has helped fuel rumors of onstage animal and virgin sacrifices, as recounted in some of the religious right's less vigorously fact-checked web-sites, though he evidently no more believes in a personal Beelzebub than a personal Jesus. Some alarmed parents may swallow the false allegations about Manson if only because devil worship - with its inherent promise of a better opposing team - is easier to latch on to and refute than the fiercely godless, nihilistic, faith-in-self-alone philosophy Manson actually extols with scary eloquence in Superstar.

Anyway, Satan may be small potatoes next to the role model he most aspires to emulate. "David always says to me, 'Manson, you're like another Elvis,'" he relates, slipping into an impression of the flat drawl of his pal David Lynch, who directed Manson's cameo as a porn star in Lost Highway. He almost seems a little bashful repeating Lynch's compliment, which, you get the distinct impression, may be the greatest thing anyone's ever said to him.

Per Presley, then, Manson says, "Maybe my next record will be a gospel record." Um... "I think I'm probably one of the only true Christians in the sense that Jesus may have intended," he elaborates. "In a sense, Marilyn Manson is Christian rock, because I'm telling people how I think the Bible should be interpreted. I think Jesus was the first sex symbol, rock star, magician, hippie, drug dealer - whatever he was, he was someone who had some views, and I don't think he was any different from someone like me. Some idiot hundreds of years from now may have a Marilyn Manson T-shirt, and a bunch of people are gonna pray to it, and they're gonna make little Marilyn Manson necklaces that everybody wears." Oh, the irony-which, of course, he would heartily approve. "Rock & roll is just as totalitarian as anything else - as a sporting event, or Bill Clinton, or Stalin, or the Pope."

Welcome to the Tower of Babel belt.

Scans

Credit: DirectorNo5819

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