MARILYN MANSON promised us champagne and caviar, but now
he’s only capable of delivering cola and crisps. To JOHN DORAN, he’s become
little more than the God Of Fucking About.
Today the God Of Fuck is merely the Petty Officer Of Fucking
About; the Local Ombudsman Of Mildly Irritating Behaviour. He’s locked in his
suitably grand room at a Park Lane hotel with plenty of absinthe and ‘a young
lady friend’. A wide-eyed reporter from a London free title eventually comes
down the stairs declaring him to be “leathered”; saying that the lanky
industro-goth was striding round his room with the girl tossed over his
shoulder chatting bare nonsense. Seasoned veterans of idiotic American rock
star behaviour, we pack up and go home leaving a business-like but
inexperienced guy from the BBC alone in the foyer waiting dutifully for an
interview. Predictably, his copy, when it appears online a few days later, is a
riot of non-sequiturs; a throbbing psychedelic grotto of drunken nonsense. It
isn’t the poor hack’s fault. Simply, the God Of Fucking Can’t Be Arsed. He’s
become the Bursar Of Talent Seepage; the Heir Of Nothing In Particular.
A few days later, he blows out the rearranged Stool Pigeon
interview as well, and not only has he sacked us off, he hasn’t even turned up
to his pre-tour rehearsals in Germany. “No one knows where he is,” says his PR
guy. The world tour starts in 48 hours.
Of course, none of this would be remarkable if it wasn’t for
sheer weight of ‘I can’t be arsed’ emanating from Brian Warner’s seventh long
player, The High End Of The Low. His albums have been patchy efforts for some
time now - since 2000’s Holy Wood (In The Shadow Of The Valley Of Death) to be
precise - and apart from the occasional mint single (‘mOBSCENE’ springs to
mind), Manson has made little effort to change things. If it weren’t for his
distinctively battered, shlocky and operatic brogue, some of the songs on The
High End Of The Low wouldn’t be out of place on a Nickelback album, or a recent
outing by Oasis.
The album was written after some young actress or other left
him. He can’t have thought much of her if this is his elegy to their
relationship. He certainly doesn’t think much of you, if you’re still one of
his fans. In fact, he must think you’re a clueless and tasteless idiot.
Even Trent Reznor, his former mentor, recently called him a
“dopey clown” in Spinner magazine: “He is a malicious guy and will step on
anybody’s face to succeed and cross any line of decency. Seeing him now, drugs
and alcohol now rule his life and he’s become a dopey clown. He used to be the
smartest guy in the room. And as a fan of his talents, I hope he gets his shit
together. During the [Downward] Spiral tour [in 1994-95] we propped them up to
get our audience turned on to them and at that time a lot of the people in my
circle were pretty far down the road as alcoholics. Not Manson. His drive for
success and self-preservation was so high, he pretended to be fucked up a lot
when he wasn’t.”
When we eventually catch up with Manson the next day, it’s
clear he has indeed been putting in a lot of time at the coke face, hoofing
lines of chisel up his prodigious nose; belting fat slugs of Charleston
straight up his nozzle until he can’t hear what anyone else around him is
saying. It’s hard to tell from a straight transcript, but he motor-mouths,
runny-nosed and sniffing, at 100mph through the interview like a long-faced
jabberwocky competing in a verbal Wacky Races, either oblivious to or
unconcerned with the questions that are being asked.
It wasn’t always thus. After an almost painfully normal and
nerdy childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, Brian Warner moulded himself into goth
provocateur Marilyn Manson (named by combining the first name of an iconic
beauty and the last name of a notorious killer - a formula that has served
other collaborators such as Twiggy Ramirez well). He formed The Spooky Kids
(the original incarnation of the act still surviving today) in 1989 influenced
by industrial bands such as Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, but with a much heavier
emphasis on the glam and the grotesque. In fact, they took the industrial metal
blueprint and amped up both the image and the transgressive nature of the
lyrics but, importantly, added a pop accessibility to the music. The
combination was dynamite. He went on to sell 44 million albums worldwide and
was arguably the most iconic figure in rock of the 1990s; the evil Elvis to
Eminem’s Sinatra.
And this is what makes his failure to climb out of his
artistic slump depressing; this fallow period of the not-so naughty noughties.
Because even after fighting his way through a snowstorm, he’s still one of the
most interesting and intelligent people this newspaper has ever had the
privilege of speaking to, and his off-the-cuff gibbering would put the faux-intellectualism
of most musicians to shame. The trouble is, Manson has turned out to be our
generation’s Alice Cooper and not our David Bowie. And you only have to talk to
him for a few minutes to realise that he could still be so much more... if he
had the inclination.
The Stool Pigeon: I want to ask you about the role of
transgression in rock music, where transgression is going, and even if the
outrageous, controversial rock star of the late 20th Century might be
redundant.
Marilyn Manson: I think by its nature it’s redundant. You
can’t really ever make any art without getting someone’s attention...
constantly. You have to say something differently, constantly. Dali said that
anyone who doesn’t steal isn’t an artist and you have to take things and make
them your own, and then when you’ve done that, you have to realise how not to
cannibalise yourself, but how to transform constantly. This record I’ve just
made allows people to witness that I’ve made a transformation. All music comes
from heartache and all music comes from pain and suffering. That’s never going
to go away, so it’s how do we learn to adapt to the fact that the whole world
is able to talk really loud now? You know, everyone’s a journalist now -
everyone’s got an opinion - and I think that just levels the playing field.
Andy Warhol told us that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes and he was
very accurate. So we have to invent new ways to make it interesting to other
people because we’re trying to appeal to other people. You have to make this
conversation interesting to someone else who wants to read it.
SP: One of the last things Plato wrote was - and I’m
paraphrasing - what’s got into the kids? The kids have gone fucking mental. So
that thing of fearing what the next generation is up to has always been with
us. But I’m also talking about the hyper-acceleration of culture. Say, for
example, if you had written a song like your new single
‘Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon’ as the follow up to ‘Lunchbox’ at the start
of your career, people would have found it a lot more shocking than they do
now.
MM: Oh, I think it is completely unshocking and completely
intentionally redundant and that was the whole point of it. I really go out of
my way to make that fit into the record. In the context of the record, it
refers to something I said that day going to the studio. It was my commentary
on how shameless and hopeless and uninteresting things are now. When you have
to put ‘goddamn’ and ‘motherfucking’ into a title that already has ‘Armageddon’
in it... you know! I was just making a point. Anyway, I didn’t write it - the
Bible wrote it - I just added a couple of new words to it. If it were Scrabble
and I just threw the letters down and they came up that way, would it be my
fault that they ended up in that sequence? [laughs] Not really. I just pushed
the button. Queue applause. And people clapped. Canned laughter. You know what
the worst thing about canned laughter is? That everyone on the tapes for canned
laughter is dead now. So it’s a room full of dead people laughing at me.
SP: What is the primary role of the transgressive rock star?
Is it to provide a safe space for kids to rebel in? Is it to hold up a mirror
to society?
MM: No, it’s for girls. It’s so you can get girls. Perhaps
not everyone should be simplified in rock’n’roll or art. It’s not a girl in
everyone’s case. But I think the only reason anyone makes anything is because
they want to connect with somebody. And I think with rock’n’roll it comes down
to being a rock star. It’s not oversimplifying what I do to say that; it would
be simplifying the reason why I do it. I’ve said it right from the beginning:
that I wanted to share the same feeling that I think everybody has. And I
wanted to be a rock star because you get away with doing and saying things and not
having to do other things. You sidestep the thing you see in front of you -
this horrible future of 9-to-5. Slavery dressed up in the form of a pay cheque.
Right now if I had to do something else, or if I was not able to do what I do,
I don’t think there would be a point. That’s not being cynical - it’s just that
I’ve seen so much. I couldn’t work like an everyday person. I think I work
harder than anyone I know - it’s just that sometimes my work is doing drugs,
drinking and taking my pants off in front of girls. Sometimes it’s writing
words that get me to the point where I can take my pants off in front of girls;
sometimes it’s writing a melody; sometimes it’s getting back together with my
best friend [Twiggy Ramirez] and taking his pants off while he is playing
guitar.
SP: Was there much mutual uncloaking of trouser regions
going on between you and Twiggy now that you’re making music together again?
MM: [laughs] Well, I think there was, really. I made that
comment metaphorically, but I guess I’ve spent 10 years saying: ‘Why can’t we
find the right guitarist to play the guitar parts that Twiggy wrote?’ And it
was right there in front of my face. The guitar is like the microphone and it
has to be played with... feeling. Sometimes you play from your dick and
sometimes you play from your heart, but not from your wallet or not from your
head. It has to be instinctual. The stuff that he played on this record was how
I felt inside. We were going through the same things emotionally, even though
you can never compare these things. I never say to someone, ‘Oh, I know how you
feel.’ You never know how someone feels. I write a song and say, ‘This is how I
feel.’ And if people can relate to it, they can put themselves into it.
SP: You’re known, in the terms of American rock and
alternative music, as the most far-out person going. You’re the God Of Fuck...
MM: I did like it when the NME... and the NME have shat upon
some of the greatest artists. I saw an anniversary issue where they said
‘Diamond Dogs: The End Of Bowie’... So they called me the God Of Fuck-All and I
liked that. I thought that was pretty good.
SP: It’s not even a dis to you, is it? It’s a bald statement
of nihilism...
MM: No, I think it’s pretty funny. I think it’s pretty funny
because it’s someone not realising that you can’t be me without having a pretty
good sense of humour. That’s the point. My name’s Marilyn Manson. People think
I’m going to come across all serious. Do I have to go to work and be all
serious and be aggressive and the God Of Fuck and whatever? I have to laugh
about it, really.
SP: This is relatively serious: I was thinking about the
fall of Rome. Contrary to this idea of wailing and gnashing of teeth, the
overall theme was one of boredom. If you’re public enemy number one of American
society - which you are to some, I guess - what happens when people become
bored of you? What happens when people aren’t shocked by you anymore?
MM: “Well, I think journalism is in a sad state when I know
that it is the proper thing to say that Marilyn Manson is not shocking. It’s
been like that from the beginning; it’s never been proper to say that I’m
shocking. Jane’s Addiction recorded one of the most influential records in my
life, Nothing’s Shocking. Were we ever shocked as kids? No, we were fascinated.
When in Rome, get a caesarean section. They invented that you know. On this
album, I feel like I can hear myself when I listen back to it, almost becoming
Nero at the end of it and saying, ‘You know what? If I can’t have love I’ll
burn everything down.’ But that is a cliché. I think this record is about the
fact that we all give up something because we want to have the thing we cannot
have. And for most of us it’s always love or someone to understand us - not to
fit in, but it is to fit in. People try and fit into a pair of jeans - fit in
with the crowd. Some people try to fit into a porn star. And it’s trying to
connect. Someone always gives up their wings to be mortal - to try and obtain
that unobtainable thing. But it’s when you give up the wings... that’s when you
don’t get it. So I have to be reminded the hard way that I was the person who
spent the later part of my earlier life saying, ‘Don’t afraid to be yourself.’
And I think I started being afraid of being myself because I was worried that
being myself wasn’t what I should be any more, because, as a person who is so
critical of everything, being me wasn’t going to be interesting enough anymore.
I had to just let go. Do you know what I mean?
SP: No.
MM: A kid shot his teacher last week and said, ‘Hail Marilyn
Manson.’ If that keeps on happening and I keep getting blamed for it... and I
suppose I should be blamed for something if my name is included in a sentence
that ends with a bullet instead of a full stop. But is it my fault? Is it the
world’s fault? Whose fault is it? I don’t know. Is anyone else saying my name?
SP: Well...
MM: Is anyone else saying my name and shooting people? Or
are people saying I believe in Jesus Christ: ‘Bang!’ I believe in Islam: ‘Bam!’
I believe in America: ‘Boom!’
SP: But that’s not...
MM: So it is sadly impressive that something like that
happens. But, at the same time, as a critic of the world, I think it doesn’t
really matter what I say or do anymore. Apparently it does, though. Maybe it’s
mattering in the wrong way sometimes, but I don’t think I’m being
irresponsible.
SP: Rewind for a second. I’ve read about the case that
you’re talking about. [Fifteen-year-old Justin Doucet who, during a recent
tooled-up rampage, managed to kill no one, despite shooting at his teacher at
point blank range and then himself in the head.] Doesn’t the blame for this lie
squarely at the feet of those opposing change to gun law? Doesn’t the blame lie
with the gun industry in the United States?
MM: Mmmm. You could, I guess, start with that, but do you
think that kid would have stopped with that train of thought just because he
couldn’t get a gun?
SP: Of course he would have!
MM: That if there wasn’t a gun, he wouldn’t have done it
with a pencil? I don’t mean writing! Obviously it would have been great if he
had done the same thing with a pencil! Which is fortunately what I chose to do,
if we’re speaking in broad brushstrokes and metaphors. There is a very fine
line between artists and killers. That’s what separates art from commerce. Art
and spirituality go hand in hand. But politics and religion are not spiritual -
they take things out of the world. That’s not to say that you can’t believe in
God. For me, God is the concept of making something. If you don’t have hope for
the future, then you can’t be an artist - there’s no point. Everyone thinks I’m
a nihilist or a fatalist and I came dangerously close to thinking like that
over the past few years. It was when I started to think that I don’t have any
feelings any more, so why bother? That is the end. Boredom. Boredom leads to
drugs. Boredom leads to, ‘Let’s invent new things because we’ve done them all.’
It’s funny that you bring up the Roman Empire because the kids have always been
too cynical and grown up too fast. Kids are senile now. They forget. They have
no history . It’s Twitter, Twitter, download, download. I don’t care about any
of that. What are you saying? What do you have to say? Can you say something?
Can you say something that is passionate? And sometimes, yeah, do I want to shoot
some of these people? Sure. You should be worried about what I’d do, if you’re
worried about what my music does. There’s gonna be a day when I shoot someone
and it’s gonna be myself or someone who says the wrong thing to me and I’m not
afraid to do it. I don’t want to go to jail and right now I don’t want to die,
so you have to make that choice. Are you stupid or are you passionate? Pick
between the two. And sadly, when kids go wild, it’s stupid. ‘When Kids Go
Wild!’ It’s a new TV show and they’re going to put my music on the soundtrack!
SP: I genuinely think kids from pretty much any country in
the world would go mad and kill people if they were allowed to. And by allowed
to, I mean if there were guns in the family home or local shop that were easy
to get to.
MM: Well, I agree. I agree. In fact I instruct everyone who
works for me to not allow me to have a firearm [laughs]. Because if I’m getting
into obvious trouble, that’s where it starts. If you have a lethal weapon near
you, that’s the beginning of stupidity - it’s always the temptation. It’s the
Garden Of Eden; it’s the fall from grace. If you see the way to destroy
something, you’re going to destroy it because you see how it’s all been created
and you get frustrated. I’m getting riled up by this conversation! You’re
getting transgression out of me!” It’s the story that will never end because
there are not enough ways to shake everybody in the entire world. You can’t
grab everyone and shake all of them.
SP: But what about...
MM: With stuff that I said on Antichrist Superstar [second
album]... I’m glad I said that stuff. At the time it was a great cum shot in
the face of people. They were shocked and were like, ‘Woah, that tasted
terrible and I didn’t really like that.’ I’m not saying the same thing on
‘Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon’. I’m not even getting close to it.
SP: I’m going to change the subject here and quite cravenly
appeal to your intellect by asking you to again look at transgression, not just
as it applies to you but to the history of pop and rock...
MM: Okay.
SP: In the beginning rock’n’roll was a hotbed of
subversiveness, whether that was underage sex (Jerry Lee Lewis); homosexuality,
or the suggestion of it when that was an absolute no-no (Little Richard); and
what I guess would have been called, negrophilia (Elvis Presley).
MM: Er, did you just say negrophilia or necrophilia?
SP: Negrophilia.
MM: Yeah, you’re correct. I’m sitting in Berlin doing this
interview. I was very fascinated with Berlin because of the birth of
expressionism when artists would be killed for saying, ‘I’m going to paint the
sky purple,’ and at the same time they [Nazis] were cursing and damning swing
dancing and using expressions like that [‘negrophilia’] and they were using
expressions like ‘the downfall of society’. They weren’t around long enough to
point at rock’n’roll, but they were there to point at what it came from. Last
night I was stuck watching television and saw the new Eminem video in which he
makes a parody of ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and I started thinking how relevant
‘Jailhouse Rock’ was to modern imagery in modern society... So I’m sitting here
thinking about ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and thinking, ‘Wow, if this video were done
today it would still be unbelievably offensive. I can’t imagine what it would
have been like then.
SP: Yeah, the thing about...
MM: It’s all criminals, rapists, murderers etc. dancing to
this guy with a hairdo and fucking hips. It’s unbelievable to me. And if you
think about what is the downfall of the world - what destroyed everything -
rock’n’roll did. That’s where it started. Well, it is and it isn’t. Rock’n’roll
is the soundtrack. When they started putting it on television, that’s when it
became a real problem. When you combine visuals with audio it’s a very powerful
medium.
SP: What about...
MM: It’s propaganda. It’s Triumph Of The Will [Leni
Riefenstahl 1934 Nazi propaganda film]. It’s where Wagner made opera
productions that had swastikas and Hitler, who had a homosexual obsession with
Wagner, said: ‘I love the way that looks, I’m going to do something with that.
I’m pissed off because I’m a bad watercolour artist.’ Everything is about
transgression. Every war. Think about nature where you have a female peacock...
SP: Peahen.
MM: Whatever, pick an animal. They go with a male from another
tribe and then they run back to the male from theirs and he is like, ‘I will
defend you and I will kill everyone.’ That is the central transgression, so
everything is about relationships and everything is about girlfriends, and
rock’n’roll defined it because rock’n’roll happened at exactly the same time as
media transformed. Rock’n’roll happened when colour television was invented.
Ironically, JFK was killed the week after colour television came out. Or was it
ironic? I would say not. If you want to have a million-hour long conversation
with me, go and look up [multinational aerospace manufacturer] Lockheed Martin
on the internet. You will be so shocked. They also invented the LP record, and
the colour television. They also invented satellite, and every bomb ever
dropped. They invented the black box. They owned the twin towers, and the plane
that flew into them. Then you become very cynical and angry about the fact that
it’s not a coincidence and everybody since the Roman empire has figured out:
‘Let’s cause people to fight each other and let’s sell them ways to do it.’ And
rock’n’roll became the one thing that really fucked it up for them because they
weren’t in charge of it. So they became in charge of it. And don’t think that
it’s a coincidence that the people who invented all of the control invented the
way to hear rock’n’roll.
SP: Who are the most important transgressive figures?
MM: Citing them? Number one: Elvis Presley. Number two: Jim
Morrison. Number three: Sex Pistols. Number four: David Bowie. And that’s just
in my life growing up as a kid...
SP: You’ve just hit on something important there. When
rock’n’roll started it was an assault on all fronts - underage sex, violence,
death, crossing the racial divide, sexuality - but only some of these things
got taken to the full extent. Why on one hand did Mötley Crüe get to take the
heterosexual sex thing to its logical conclusion and...
MM: They didn’t do a good enough job...
SP: ...and artists like yourself have explored fully the
interface between totalitarianism and the rock show, but no one really has even
muddied the waters of incest or underage sex or even homosexuality to any great
extent? I mean, in 10 years time, will we have a rock group comprised of openly
paedophilic men? They could be called The Paedos In Speedos...
MM: [laughs] It’s funny you should say that because I have a
[1995] record called Smells Like Children, you know? And I had a conversation
prior to its release where I was told to take the song called ‘Pretty Little
Swastika’ off my album. I did and this was not pandering to censorship [the
track is now called ‘Pretty Little $’]. Their censorship choice was made purely
because of money. They said, ‘Take that song off your record because there are
two things you can’t do in music - you can never say anything anti-Semitic, and
you can never say anything about paedophilia.’ I said, ‘Thanks for telling me
that. I’m going to go ahead and combine them for you on a song and then I’m
going to shave a swastika into my girlfriend’s pubic hair and make her wear
pigtails.’ But it’s not advocating either one. They’re hateful! It’s a
statement. I didn’t invent the words and symbols that everyone associates with
me, and I didn’t invent any sort of profanity. I wish I could make up a new
curse word, but they’ve all been made up already. Can you blame a kid for
taking building blocks with letters on them, throwing them down and having them
they spell out ‘fuck a kid’ or ‘kill your parents’? No, you can’t, because it’s
what’s in your head. So raise your kids. Let them read books, and let them make
their own choices. Don’t tell people how to think, they get mad. And then
they’ll either kill themselves or kill you.
SP: Isn’t the real barrier...
MM: Listen, I have to go in a second and rehearse... they’re
waiting for me.
SP: Look, isn’t the last barrier homosexuality? People run
up against it all the time - people like Bowie and yourself (and you’re not
even gay), and other actual homosexual rock stars...
MM: Most of them are homosexual, we just don’t know it yet.
SP: Where are all the gay rock stars? Where are all the rock
stars who were supposed to come out after Rob Halford of Judas Priest? If you
took all the members of Metallica, Slipknot, Machine Head, Nickelback and
Anthrax, I could guarantee you that at least two of those guys have had
penetrative sex with another man, and fucking enjoyed it. Surely the most
rebellious thing you could do if you’re a musician now is to be gay?
MM: Yes.
SP: I like to think that one day we’ll have another Sex Pistols
moment because there’s some new crunk band: four gay black rappers who perform
naked with erections and then suck each off between songs.
MM: Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. It is the ultimate taboo and I
think it was brought up in a film that was very well done and I recommend it,
called Dahmer, about [serial killer] Jeffrey Dahmer. They were talking about
what is the most rebellious thing you can do and they said homosexuality was
going against nature essentially. But it’s not necessarily against nature. It
only became against nature back on page 53 of the Bible or whatever. Sodom and
Gomorrah: you’ve got a city named after ass-fucking, which is pretty fantastic.
They burned it to the ground. I got beat up by skinheads in south Florida when
I started Marilyn Manson because Nazi skinheads thought I was a Jewish
homosexual; straight-edge skinheads thought I was a Jewish homosexual drug
addict. It’s stupid people who have just enough intelligence to read something
that someone more stupid than them wrote and then they get confused and want to
fight themselves, but they end up taking it out on other people. I mean I’m not
gay, but I’ve had Twiggy’s penis in my mouth. It wasn’t erect and neither was
mine. Neither of us are queer.
SP: Who hasn’t had Twiggy’s penis in their mouth?
MM: Nicely said. Who hasn’t? But I’m not afraid to face that
ultimate rock’n’roll thing. I like to be able to look out in the audience and
see girls first and then guys. Not the reverse. But I was in the front row of a
Judas Priest concert, so maybe I could have gone the other way! People, when
they find out, are stupid: ‘If you suck my dick I’m gonna beat your ass!’
That’s kind of the attitude. ‘But if a gay guy sucks my dick he’s a faggot!’
It’s aggravation and fear and that does feed a great deal of rock’n’roll music:
Madonna, Prince, Bowie, everyone who has toyed with sexuality. I thought that I
hadn’t, but I’d forgotten all about ‘Cake and Sodomy’ on the first record, so I
guess I’ve got amnesia when it comes to that. I guess I try to drink a lot so
I’ll forget the bad things I do. People try and get rid of the problem, but you
can’t get rid of it. I don’t understand why people keep on trying. Every
religious figure likes to do those things and it’s so exposed now. Essentially
that’s why people become priests - because they have homosexual desires and
they want to silence them. But wearing a collar doesn’t stop you from being a
cocksucker. And that’s your pull quote right there.