GROSSMONT COLLEGE–Marilyn Manson perfectly foreshadowed Born Villain as his self-proclaimed “comeback album” when Loudwire.com interviewed him earlier this month. On April 30 the release hit the iTunes Top 10 charts in 17 countries,while the U.S. release date for the CD was set for May 1.
Marilyn Manson’s upcoming persona/theme is his commentary on the irrelevant and bizarre nature of celebrity status. In Germany’s Bild news tabloid he articulated the concept surrounding his new album and persona. “A villain is not a criminal like everyone thinks,” he said. “A bad guy is a villain who breaks the rules because he believes in something. However, a villain is a rebel who can offer nothing. That’s me.”
Manson was best known for three albums he called “The Triptych”, beginning with industrial-metal album Antichrist Superstar and continuing with the glam throwback Mechanical Animals. Holy Wood, the third installment, was a conceptualized backlash against accusations incorrectly linking his music with the Columbine High School massacre. That unlinked correlation could have drastically ended his career.
Susan White’s biography Smells Like White Trash discussed multiple bomb and gun threats thrown at Manson during his mid-90s Antichrist Superstar tour. Alternative-culture expert Gavin Baddeley stated in his book Lucifer Rising, “So adamant were assertions that Marilyn Manson was to blame that, if newspapers took their own hypothesis of murder-by-influence seriously, the print media could stand accused of endangering his life by making him a target for unstable Christians.”
The criticism forced Marilyn Manson into seclusion, where he became highly involved with painting. Most recently he has painted with tattoo inks. On Triple-J, the Australian radio program, he said, “You realize what you’re really capable of when you limit yourself to painting with one color.”
Salvador Dali is one painter who Marilyn Manson especially looked up to. In the internet talk show As it Lays Manson said, “I really admire Salvador Dali because he lived his art.” The web-master of The Nachtkabarett also cited Manson’s idolization of Salvador Dali in a 2010 interview for MansonWiki.com. Web-master Nick Kushner said, “The thing about influential artists like Salvador Dali is that they didn’t just create art. They lived it minute-by-minute without distinctions from the commonplace events of life.”
However, Manson’s involvement with the surrealism community doesn’t end with artists as popular as Salvador Dali. Cinematically, Manson paid homage to the imagery and style of his personal friend, the underground surreal film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky. Transformers and Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull star Shia LaBeouf directed a short film inspired by Dali’s Un Chien Andalou and Shakespeare’s Macbeth in order to preview Manson’s new album, Born Villain. With imagery of torture artists and perverse sexuality, the short film was a slap in the face to more “pop”-oriented video-singles such as Madonna’s Justify My Love or U2’s Numb. Commenting on the collaboration, Manson said, “The score from my new album is, in the words of Macbeth, ‘full of sound and fury.’ … I like the idea of a yawning MGM lion far more interesting than that of a roaring one. You ask why we did this? No reason.”
But Nick Kushner saw a method behind the madness two years before the release of the short film, claiming, “The concurrent theme Manson expresses through his art, persona, and music has always been the freedom of the individual to use his or her creativity to its fullest extent without being bound by the confines of what society, at any given time period, imposes upon the individual as to what’s deemed as moral or appropriate. The concept of rebirth and transformation goes hand in hand with this theme with the power that art has to effect both the viewer and he whom is creating it.”
Manson’s artistic sensibilities keep his art entertaining and prevent that art from becoming dull and moralistic (whether the art medium is musical, painted, or cinematic in nature). Kushner explains, “For art to effect change, powerful imagery must be employed. Not simply for shock, but in representing certain themes, a certain persona or imagery is necessary to evoke and illustrate certain artistic themes.”
Marilyn Manson has garnered a black jacket with a Cross of Lorraine design on the back to open for many shows in his recent world tour (what he refers to as a visual pun for a “double-cross” symbol). In many of the Australian and Japanese shows he’s flaunted the jacket while he started the show with his 1996 album’s title-track “Antichrist Superstar”.
The “double-cross” insignia might relate to Marilyn Manson’s self-identification as a scapegoat. Aaron and Jen, former MansonWiki.com volunteers, said of Manson’s persona, “Manson made himself a scapegoat for the uglier and excessive side of society that people usually try to turn a blind eye to, but nevertheless exists. When people are offended by Marilyn Manson, they don’t realize they’re just being confronted with a reflection of themselves.”
Manson contributed further to this reflective quality by a greater foray into the cultural zeitgeist- spoken word. At the Getty Museum Marilyn Manson read “The Proverbs of Hell” by William Blake for the Getty’s “Dark Blushing” poetry event. Spoken word allowed him to retrace the influence from the poetry circuit that he belonged to in Florida, before he was signed to a major label. His physical appearance at the event was quite unpredictable. Wearing little or no makeup made him appear as if Marilyn Manson was in disguise, like the way that the comic book character Clark Kent is out of disguise and personified as Superman when his glasses are taken off. His black suit could have been tasteful and dashing attire anywhere. The only other thing that set him apart were the boots like Doc Martens that would belong to a traditional “goth’ uniform.” Several months later AMP Rock TV picked him up for a series of musicians’ spoken word pieces, with Manson reciting the lyrics to his new track “Overneath the Path of Misery.”
With music, painting, film, and spoken word under his belt he has become the inverse of Andy Warhol. Manson has elevated his status to be the pinnacle of “anti-pop” by making art out of themes of violence, decay, and perversion. Throughout the years his physical persona has been represented to establish beauty out of an otherworldly appearance. Even the Stardoll.com site has a “dress-up Manson ‘doll’” above clean-cut celebs to dress up like Akon or Jennifer Lopez. The ugliness Marilyn Manson has been attempting to portray was always prophetic of the cultural wasteland that is reality TV or the failed concept of stardom for stardom’s sake. By injecting art and culture into the mainstream Marilyn Manson has become one of the “Beautiful People” who are analyzed in the lyrics to the Antichrist Superstar single of the same name. Hopefully his new album Born Villain should warn the status quo about the hypocrisy in superstardom before society devours itself from mass consumerism.
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Wais is a student at Grossmont College
