Marilyn Manson taught me a new word: dystopia. My Merriam
Webster's Collegiate dictionary, Tenth Edition defines it as an
"imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives."
Marilyn Manson used it in a sentence when he was describing his band's
new album, Mechanical Animals, the follow-up to Antichrist superstar,
the 1996 industrial concept album that propelled him to stardom. "On
Antichrist Superstar I was dealing with everything from my past and
using that to try and become something very superhuman," said the
29-year old singer. "So I shut off a lot of my emotions and numbed
myself. Writing my autobiography forced me to examine my life, and I
began to start feeling again. When I started to experience empathy, it
felt to me like being an infant or an alien. Mechanical Animals
documents that and dreams of a kind if dystopia."
I nodded in understanding. I mean, I did comprehend and appreciate
almost everything-Marilyn Manson's tortured adolescence in Ohio has been
well-documented in articles and his best-selling autobiography, The Long
Hard Road Out of Hell. Marilyn Manson kept his sunglasses on the entire
time, although he had drawn the drapes. I wanted to put mine on too,
but I didn't think it would be cool to whip them out, like a copycat.
Marilyn Manson wore pinstriped pants and a sheer white shirt with blue
markings on it-and sipped some amber liquid.
We sat together on a couch. I had seen David Letterman flailing
during an interview with him. Dave obviously knew nothing about him and
was trying to wing it, and the musician was having none of it. "He was
wearing more makeup than me, and it scared me," Manson told me. I was
more informed than Dave, but I had been faxed the lyrics to the new
album only an hour before. But he had explained his childhood time and
time again in interviews and his book-stuff about how a perverted
grandfather and a Christian school were defining circumstances for him.
Marilyn Manson continued his explanation of the thinking behind the
album-which is more rock and less industrial than his previous work-and
the feature film he plans to make as a companion piece to it. "The more
I began to feel, the less that it seemed the world felt, and that's when
I started seeing everything and everyone as mechanical animals-people
that looked and acted human, but were to me, metaphorically more like
androids," said Marilyn Manson. "There was no soul or spirit inside. I
grunted in assent. I asked Manson how he managed to shut off his
emotions for all those years. "Mostly by being self-destructive," he
said. "I would put myself through a lot of physical pain with drugs or
with masochistic behavior. And that was something that transformed me,
really. I found myself being a different person." Yet no therapy was
involved. "I've tried a couple of times, but I find that self
examination works better for me than trying to explain it to someone
else," he said. "I guess music is my therapy."
A lot of the songs on the record deal with fame, which is very
common for a newly famous band. "I examined what I see fame doing to
other people and how I try to separate myself from that, and how it
isolates you, how it puts you in the position of being an oddity or
something," said Manson, who wears breasts in the video, "The Dope
Show." He said he did it in order to "represent vulnerability and
sexlessness and how the world looks at me as something they can't
fathom."
Another theme that runs through the album is drugs. I asked if he
still doing them, but apparently I missed the point. "I meant narcotics
as a metaphor for people's need to numb themselves," he said. "That's
what Mechanical Animals is hinting at: that we're encouraged to not
have emotions, to not be individuals, to not have an opinion." Oh. "As
far as the message on the album, when it comes to drugs, it's not a
positive or a negative," he said. "In the past I used drugs to fill a
void. But now it more for inspiration or just purely recreation. I
don't do them to excess." According to the book, he's never done heroin
but is a fan of cocaine.
What defines Marilyn Manson for a lot of people is his distaste for
organized religion, a revulsion that he developed while attending that
Christian school. His parents sent him there because they wanted him to
get a good education. He got into satanism a bit as a teenager because
one of his stoner friends had a Satan-worshipping brother. Once Mason
got famous, he met Anton LaVey, the late founder of the Church of Satan.
Whatever to satanism-I'll chalk it up to youthful confusion.
"If God does exist, it's in music and in art," said Manson. "I
think that there is more spirituality in what I do than in a lot of
religious groups; judging, especially, in the way they've treated me in
the past couple of years." He was referring to the candlelight vigils
protesting his "ungodliness" at the shows. "I've grown tired of talking
about religion. It's time for me to move on. I am trying to redefine
the idea of spirituality and make it not such a bad word for myself,
because I find I sound really stupid saying it sometimes."
Most people feel stupid talking about spirituality. The genius of
Marilyn Manson is that he doesn't. There's a definite spirituality
trend going on with celebrities, and it reminds me of organized
religion: it's what everyone else is doing. But Marilyn Manson really
seems to have some to it from the inside out, instead of the other way
around.
transcribed by misreznor, from jane