Interview:2000/11/04 The Fall Guy

The Fall Guy
Interview with Marilyn Manson
Date	November 4, 2000
Source	The Guardian
Interviewer	Sean O'Hagan

Marilyn Manson's songs revolve around guns, religion and sexual perversion. He sees himself as a revolutionary and artist: much of America sees him as the devil incarnate - depraver of youth and inspiration for a horrifying high school massacre. Sean O'Hagan hears his defence

On the night of August 9, 1969, on the leafy streets of West Hollywood, the Manson "family" carried out the ritual murders of five people, including the actress Sharon Tate. The killings spread fear and revulsion across the Hollywood Hills and beyond, signalling both the end of the hippy dream and the beginning of a collective psychic unease. Back then, riven by a foreign war and a cauldron of domestic unrest, America found in Charles Manson - who was a hippy and a psychopath - the bogeyman it needed.

Now, more than 30 years later, West Hollywood is home to a rock star whose celebrity arguably outstrips even that of the killer whose surname he has adopted - whether in homage or as provocation it's hard to tell. Marilyn Manson, at 30, inhabits a complex role: the pop star as scapegoat.

In the past few years, he has been accused by politicians, church leaders and concerned parents, of corrupting and depraving America's young - nothing new here in rock'n'roll terms. What took the collective fury to a new plane was the shootings at Columbine high school in Colorado last year, when two boys killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher.

In the media-fuelled hysteria that followed, Manson was held responsible: the boys were followers of his, so the accusations went (wrongly as it turned out), and his music was an incitement to murder.

He has, in short, become a focus for the anger, disgust and helplessness that America feels when confronted with irrefutable evidence of its own fallibility. Though obviously shaken by the intensity of the post-Columbine media witch-hunt, the role of contemporary American scapegoat is one Marilyn Manson revels in, and exploits for maximum melodrama.

The release of his new album, Holy Wood (In the Shadow Of The Valley Of Death), is timed to coincide with the climax of the presidential election campaign, which should be doubly interesting because the Democratic candidate for vice-president, senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, is one of Manson's most consistent, and loudest, critics, famously describing the group as "perhaps the sickest act ever promoted by a mainstream record company".

Manson's position as rock's reigning controversialist will be reinforced. "Oh, it's sure to start again as soon as I put my head above the parapet," he chuckles, obviously relishing the notion, "simply because I don't think the people I am attacking will ever understand the satire or the irony in my work.

"They will react to the surface in the same old knee-jerk way and hate me, and probably want to kill me again. And that really does fuel my fire. See, I guess I need them like they need me. They don't have a living, breathing devil and I am more than happy to play that role."

Since the extraordinary success of his cross-over album, 1996's Antichrist Superstar, which entered the US charts at number three and has since sold several million copies, and at a time when rock music seems a hopelessly outmoded medium for rebellion and dissent, he has been an inspired provocateur and a lightning rod for controversy; someone who effortlessly inflames the right and doggedly tests the tolerance of liberal America.

Today, though, his etiolated frame stretched out on a sofa in the dimly-lit interior of his manager's chic, minimalist office, Marilyn Manson comes across as the antithesis of his reputation. He immediately apologises for his lateness, which, by celebrity standards, is not really late at all. His responses are measured, thoughtful, often incisive. He is dressed head-to-toe in black, a pair of designer wraparound shades completing an ensemble that looks more Gucci than goth.

His stick-thin frame is topped with an androgynous face whose pallor is emphasised by the shock of lank black hair that falls to his shoulders. In this light, he could pass for Nick Cave's slightly camp, even ganglier, younger brother. His voice is low, his enunciation slow and slightly drawled as seems to be the vogue among America's current arbiters of unease.

He does not, though, seem pharmaceutically dislocated in the manner of say, Harmony Korine, the young auteur of trailer-park America, whom Manson considers one of his few creative compatriots. One senses this is someone who takes himself, his music, and his role as America's reigning rock seer and self-styled spawn of Satan utterly seriously. "I consider myself an artist," he says at one point. "I like to think I'm more Oscar Wilde than Ozzy Osbourne".

It is difficult to imagine what Wilde would make of a song such as Scabs, Guns & Peanut Butter, whose title alone gives fair indication of the singer's abiding obsessions. His imminent album consists of a fresh slew of songs such as Disposable Teens, Target Audience (Narcissus Narcosis) and A Place In The Dirt; songs about guns and religion, mass media and martyrdom, alienation and death.

These are the constants of Marilyn Manson's work, articulated in his trademark angsty, screechy voice against a backdrop of loud, brutal, riff-leaden goth-metal. It is an acquired taste: readers of Kerrang! will be on relatively safe ground; anyone who prefers music that can be described in terms of "nuance" or even "melody" would be well advised to look elsewhere. On The Death Song, he howls a not untypical refrain: "We are on a bullet and we're headed straight into God". Subtlety, as one glance at his wardrobe will attest, is not Manson's strong point.

Then again, subtlety would probably be lost both on his target audience, the hordes of alienated American adolescents who lap up this stuff, and on his myriad opponents, who view him as a threat, not just to the minds of their impressionable sons and daughters, but to the American way of life itself.

"I actually think I'm engaged in a revolution," he tells me, without a trace of irony, "in a fight worth fighting. Our generation don't have a war. This is our fight, and it is against conservatism and ignorance, whether in American politics or American Christianity."

Born and raised plain Brian Warner in the town of Canton, Ohio, Manson is the son of a nurse and a furniture salesman who served as a helicopter mechanic in Vietnam. His childhood was certainly strange: he underwent regular physical and psychological studies conducted by a government agency in order to determine whether his health had been affected by his father's possible contact with Agent Orange, the highly toxic pesticide dumped over Vietnam by American forces.

He was, he has said, the only one in these groups of the offspring of Vietnam vets who was not physically deformed, and retains to this day an attraction to what he calls, "physical otherness". In the first chapter of his by turns hilarious and disgusting biography, The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell, he describes in lingering detail an interlude when he spied on his grandfather masturbating in a room full of toy trains. Sickness and sexual perversion, usually sadistic, retain an abiding fascination for the adult Warner, whose stock-in-trade is shock, self-abasement and transgression.

It is possible that Brian Warner might never have metamorphosed into Marilyn Manson had his parents not sent him to the Heritage Christian School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1974, where he learned that albums by WASP, Judas Priest and Queen were conduits for the teachings of Satan.

Inspired, he made his first recordings there, taping and selling his own songs about sexual perversion, masturbation and farting. Like Korine, or Trey Parker, co-creator of South Park, he was a regular middle-class, middle-American heavy metal kid, and also a budding capitalist. "I'd buy a WASP record for seven bucks and then sell it to some kid whose parents wouldn't allow him to go to the store," he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1996, "then later in the day I'd go steal the album back and keep it for myself. I didn't realise it at the time but there's always been this underlying theme in the stuff that I do: it's teaching people not to be stupid."

By the late 80s, the teenaged Brian Warner was writing prose - "horror stories mostly" - for Night Terror magazine and contributing features and interviews to a rock magazine, The 25th Parallel, for which he interviewed Trent Reznor, lead singer of industrial goth-metal group, Nine Inch Nails.

Soon after, Warner formed his first group, Marilyn Manson & The Spooky Kids. "I wanted a name that said it all, almost a brand name. I took a celebrity martyr and a celebrity killer and put them together. If you want to understand America, you have to look at the celebrity process. It's sick and its utterly revealing about our need to celebrate even the worst aspects of our culture."

In 1993, Marilyn Manson signed to Reznor's Nothing label, releasing Portrait Of An American Family, produced by Reznor in his own home - the house where Sharon Tate was murdered. The album was a cult success, the subsequent tour, a sign of what was to come: Manson was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, for "violation of the Adult Entertainment Code" for allegedly exposing himself and simulating sex on stage.

The following year, an EP entitled Smells Like Children appeared, and the group hit pay dirt with an inspired reading of the Eurythmics' typically anodyne Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This), which suddenly seems loaded with all manner of murky undertones.

Fuelled by some Herculean multi-drug use, the 1995 American tour descended into a marathon orgy of self-abuse and attendant controversy that culminated, in true Spinal Tap fashion, with Manson sacking drummer Sara Lee Lucas by setting fire to his drum kit midway through a show. (Odd, sexually contrary pseudonyms seem to be a prerequisite for the group, which currently includes Madonna Wayne Gacy and Manson's longtime associate, Twiggy Ramirez.) Among the backstage diversions was an on-camera confession booth designed supposedly to "suck sins" from fans and groupies.

In The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell, one chapter details the torture and sexual degradation of willing, usually female, fans, many of whom have carved his name on their chests as an act of homage. In places, I tell him, the book reeked of old school rock'n'roll misogyny, in others, it suggests a warped imagination addicted to wilful exaggeration.

He seems to interpret this as a compliment. "Well, I do have a gift for hyperbole," he drawls. "But, often, the things that seem the most exaggerated can be the most true. I'll leave it to the discerning reader to make up their own mind." Did he, I wonder, regret some of the depths that he has plumbed in the past: the humiliation of already damaged individuals who seem drawn to Manson and his music in order to vindicate their dysfunctionalism rather than to find redemption.

There is a thoughtful pause. "Well, I don't see it that way. Regret is a negative emotion, like guilt. Plus, I attract outsiders and misfits because I am one. I think I voice a lot of their alienation because for a long time I felt it. Still do, to a degree. That said, there is evolution and character growth in everyone, and things I did even a year ago, or five years ago, I wouldn't do now. It was, how shall I put it, a voyage of discovery. I had to go out there and experience it all."

Although Manson ended up in hospital from his spiralling drug habit during the making of 1996's Antichrist Superstar, the difficult birth produced a record that propelled him into the mainstream. An impossibly convoluted goth-metal concept album about personal and global apocalypse, Antichrist Superstar remains Marilyn Manson's defining statement.

Though it sounded neither new nor particularly inspired, it was perfectly timed: a big, doomy, histrionic, end-of-the-millennium howl of anger and anguish. Plus, Manson looked weird, otherworldly even, and, like David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust before him, paraded his polysexuality almost as a badge of identity.

From this side of the Atlantic, it is difficult to make sense of Manson's celebrity infamy and the hysteria he provokes, not least because his music has never brought him any critical credibility. Although the genre was invented in the UK by groups such as The Cure, The Mission and Sisters Of Mercy, goth is seen here as the music of the terminally adolescent and unapologetically pretentious: a soundtrack for those who spend their lives in black-painted bedrooms convinced that moroseness is an aesthetic end in itself.

In America, though, most notably on the sunny, unreal West Coast, goth, whether old school (The Cure, The Cult), industrial (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails), or arty (The Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson), equals cool. In the land of sun-tanned, health-obsessed body fascism, a penchant for black eyeliner, pale skin and layers of greying lace and velvet signifies otherness, outsiderdom, and remains a sure-fire way to shock and outrage parents, politicians and society at large. What is dismissed here as adolescent pantomime posturing, more Addams family than Manson family, is often seen over there as the first step on the slippery slope to eternal damnation.

Manson's now infamous 1996/7 Dead To The World tour was a triumph of spectacle and puerility. The provocations included wilful obscenity: mock copulation, onanism and flagellation; and even more wilful blasphemy: a pulpit draped in pseudo-fascist banners from which he ripped up copies of the Bible, and led the audience in chants of "kill God". Needless to say, the Christian right responded vigorously, picketing gigs and lobbying the Senate and state authorities in (sometimes successful) attempts to have shows banned. Things reached an absurd pitch when, in Texas, a fan was arrested on his way to a gig for wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt.

Manson fuelled anger and opprobrium, as well as obsessive devotion, across America, in much the same way that the Sex Pistols did in Britain in 1977. But, whereas Johnny Rotten and his cohorts homed in on the Queen as the symbol of all things moribund and hypocritical about Great Britain, Manson chose God - or, to be more precise, contemporary Christianity - as the symbol of everything in mainstream America he held in contempt.

He aroused an almost primordial fear in the hearts of his enemies by declaring in interviews that he was a Satanist. In his biography, he writes, "The devil doesn't exist. Satanism is about worshipping yourself, because you are responsible for your own good and evil... I'm not, and never have been, a spokesperson for Satanism. It's simply part of what I believe in, along with Dr Seuss, Dr Hook, Nietzsche and the Bible..."

Again, the irony, as well as the veiled retraction, was lost on the American religious right. There are currently countless Christian and/or concerned parents' anti-Marilyn Manson internet sites. The Dayton Family Network, for instance, prints Manson's song lyrics preceded by the following warning: "Please proceed only if you are prepared to confront Satan himself". A show in Orlando, Florida, in 1999, was picketed by Christian groups who distributed a protest prayer, which, in its apocalyptic poetry, gives some indication of the kind of mind-set Manson has chosen, in his singular way, to do battle with. It reads:

O foul and evil spirits who have brought

The music group Marilyn Manson into Orlando,

And have consumed and possessed the bodies and minds

Of all who are part of the group or an aid to their movements,

By the power given us by Jesus Christ, and in his holy name,

We hereby bind the buses and trucks that will bring

Marilyn Manson and their music into our community,

We bind the engine that makes the car run,

And the fuel that makes the engine run,

We bind the lights and the amplifiers,

The microphones and the musical equipment

Needed for their vile and blasphemous

performance. We bind the mouth and hands and feet

Of the members of Marilyn Manson

So that they cannot sow lies

And spread discontent among our youth...

Needless to say, the show went ahead. "That kind of reaction is kinda boring now," Manson sighs, drawing bony fingers through his hair. "It's, like, so preprogrammed and one dimensional and dumb in a particularly American way. The thing that bugs me most about Christians is their assumption they have a monopoly on morality; the premise they start from is that they have a literally God-given right to impose their belief systems on everyone else.

"It's like, those people in Africa are heathens, we need to convert them to God. I mean, c'mon, in this day and age. It's almost too easy to get them going but, in a way, it needs to be done because they do have real power, and they'd like to be able to silence anyone who differs. Religion is big business in America and it's not taxed. How morally wrong is that? I kinda see myself, among other things, as a fighter for freedom of speech. I plead the First Amendment every time."

If 1998's Mechanical Animals, which added glam-rock signatures to the goth-metal formula, suggested that Manson had mellowed, the events of April 20, 1999, suddenly sealed his reputation as the man America loved to hate. And blame.

On that day, two high school students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both members of a loosely-knit teenage cabal who shared a Hitler fixation, and called themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, walked into Columbine high school in Littleton, Colorado, and killed 13 people. The apparently motiveless massacre sent America into a frenzy of recrimination, which centred not on obvious contributing factors such as the easy availability of guns nor the dysfunctional family backgrounds of the two protagonists, but on the search for a scapegoat.

Rock's sexually indeterminate, self-confessed Satanist was the figure they chose to blame. KILLERS WORSHIPPED ROCK FREAK MANSON, howled the Sun, aping the headlines across the Atlantic, before adding to the mountain of misinformation and exaggeration that now clung to his name: "The reviled rock star's live shows feature routines such as smoking dried excrement, performing depraved sex acts and torturing animals."

In America, the anti-Marilyn Manson frenzy reached such intensity that he was forced to cut short his tour amid fears of reprisals on the band and road crew. "I saw it happen live on TV and I said immediately, 'They're going to blame me for this.' Five minutes later, I heard the reporter say, 'The killers were wearing white make-up and Marilyn Manson T-shirts.' All completely untrue, as it turned out. I mean, they didn't even like me. I looked into it after it happened: they weren't wearing make-up, they weren't goth kids.

"These were white, urban kids, pretty well-off, with no apparent reason to go on a killing spree. They weren't white trash nor ghetto kids, and I think that was difficult for America to take. It raised some hard questions about our society but, of course, the knee-jerk response prevailed - 'Who's to blame? Let's get the weirdo.' The way I see it, the mass psychology is - as long as America can find a bad guy, everyone can feel safe. It's that simple."

In the end, finding that "in the business, suddenly all these doors were shutting in my face", Manson wrote an impassioned and articulate response in Rolling Stone magazine. "I was approached by every media outlet in America, but I refused to be part of the charade. Then, when things died down a bit, I thought, I have to respond to this. I mean, I was upset like everyone else by what happened. I'm not some emotionless creature. I thought it was horrendous and sad.

"But, mostly, I was disgusted, I mean, these guys got exactly what they wanted - fame. They were on the cover of Time magazine. To me, it was grotesque. And, I was disgusted by the media sitting back there, judging and blaming everyone else for what they had helped create. I threatened to sue any media outlet that associated my name with the Columbine killings. There was no way I was going to be the fall guy for a nation".

The fallout of the Columbine killings seems to have effected some kind of sea-change in Marilyn Manson's outlook. You get the feeling he is no longer content with shock and provocation for its own sake, nor with the reductive, almost cartoonish, image of himself that prevails among all but his most loyal fans.

He stays indoors a lot when he is not on the road, holed up in his Hollywood Hills mansion, once owned by Harry Houdini, another master of illusion and self-mythology. His tabloid-documented romance with actress Rose McGowan seems to have stabilised him somewhat, psychologically as well as creatively.

The new album, though still histrionic and angst-ridden, seems somehow less self-obsessed, more concerned with the bigger picture: a nation's need for bad guys, demons, scapegoats whom it can vilify and simultaneously canonise. But Manson's music is still one long howl against: against the mainstream, against his detractors, but mainly against the America that made him.

"I'm still angry," he admits, "but I'm happy too. I'm happy so long as I can express myself without being censored, if I can fight back, tell people they don't have to be sheep, that it's all right not to conform, not to compete, not to fit in. There's an added dimension because everything is shifting so fast - technology, information - and the powers that be are afraid because they sense that their kids are way smarter than them. When people are afraid, they run to religion, to the right. That's what's happening in America, that's why it's so easy - and so dumb - to put the blame on someone like me."

And yet, without the vilification of the Christian and political right, one cannot help thinking that Marilyn Manson would simply be another loud, wilfully obnoxious, schlock-rock American metal act screaming at the converted. Currently the alternative, and even mainstream, American charts are full of the same, groups such as Limp Bizkit and Slipknot: young, white, whiny American brats whose puerile songs and tired tirades suggest a terminal cultural solipsism rather than any real radicalism.

What sets Manson apart is his ability to push all the right buttons that, without fail, send his opponents into paroxysms, then to milk the shock and hysteria to the max. Marilyn Manson may be a weirdo, but he is a media-savvy, techno-literate weirdo. "People think I'm a monster who eats puppies," he says. "But, y'know, I don't even take that on board any more. And, despite everything that's happened, I feel strangely optimistic. I have a strange sense of idealism and even altruism.

"At the same time," he adds, "I might just get up in the morning and spray a gallon of hairspray into the air just to destroy the ozone layer because I really believe mankind deserves nothing more than to end itself because we have behaved so idiotically for so long."

Try as he may, Marilyn Manson cannot transcend the adolescent within: therein lies his creative and political limitations - and the key to his extraordinary success. Currently a much bigger superstar than an antichrist, his fame says more about America than all his songs put together. To his credit, he is aware of the irony. "I'm in a strange place, all right," he admits. "What I set out to subvert, I got sucked into in some way. That's the nature of celebrity - I've become part of what I set out to destroy. That's the big struggle right now. Who knows where it will end?" What's the worst thing, I ask in conclusion, that could happen to you? "I guess I could become a role model," he answers, grimacing. "Now, that would be really hard to take."

Holy Wood (In the Shadow Of The Valley Of Death) will be released on the Nothing/Interscope label on November 13.