With muffled percussion, haunting chimes and a wiry guitar sound perfectly befitting its vampiric tone, Evidence is the closest to arena rock perfection Manson ever got. Not that he tones it down much at all, mind, with lyrics that feel all the more malevolent for their relative understatement.
A song from the beginning of that same journey of disassociation, The Dope Show is one of several landmark tracks on Mechanical Animals that sees Manson coming to terms with infamy. An army of edgelords may have balked at what they saw as selling out with a more commercial direction, but the rest of us were just desperate to jump into the wildest party in rock. The Samuel Bayer-directed music still haunts our nightmares, too, with Manson in his most terrifying, chrome-fanged form. Metaphorically comparing his grip to that of the titular noose — constrictive, and as capable of taking a life as saving one — its wilfully abstract lyrics conjure images of drug use, suicide and sadomasochism.
After declining to discuss the incident publicly — as a protest against media sensationalism — he addressed the situation with slithering, spine-tingling potency on the third single from Holy Wood. The final track from Mechanical Animals remains an unsurpassed anthem for hardcore fans. Read this next: Marilyn Manson ranks his own albums The ever-changing faces of Marilyn Manson 6 things we want from the new Marilyn Manson album.
Marilyn Manson. Birds of Hell Awaiting. Blank And White. Blood Honey. Born Again. Born Villain. Break You Down. Breaking the Same Old Ground. Broken Needle. Burning Flag.
Cake And Sodomy. Cat In The Hat. Children of Cain. Choklit Factory. Coma Black. Coma White. Come Together The Beatles cover. Cruci-fiction In Space. Cupid Carries a Gun. D Is for Dirty Demo. Dance of the Dope Hats. Dancing With The One-Legged Dead God. Deep Six.
Devil in My Lunchbox. Diary Of A Dope Fiend. Disposable Teens. Don't Chase the Dead. Don't Pray For Me. Dope Hat. Down In The Park. Dune Buggy. Eat Me, Drink Me. Empty Sounds of Hate. Everlasting Cocksucker. Every Time. Five To One. Food Pyramid. Forbidden Fruit. Forest Head. Four Rusted Horses. Fuck Frankie. Fundamentally Loathsome. Get My Rocks Off. Get Your Gunn. Golden Years David Bowie cover. Great Big White World. Halfway and One Step Forward. Heaven Upside Down. Hey, Cruel World I Hate Demo.
I Want To Disappear. If I Was Your Vampire. Inauguration Of The Mechanical Christ. Infinite Darkness. Insect Pins. Into the Fire. Irresponsible Hate Anthem. Junk The Magic Dragon. Just A Car Crash Away. Ka-Boom Ka-Boom. Keep My Head Together. Kiddie Grinder.
Killing Strangers. King Kill Lamb Of God. Lay Down Your Goddamn Arms. Learning To Swim. Leave A Scar. Let Your Ego Die. Little Horn. Lovegame [Chew Fu Ghettohouse Fix]. Man Son Of Sam. And what brought that on was that right before I had to fly to Ohio and see my father because my mother died. I think that was her way of letting go of my father and me. Then, a few months after her death, his father came to visit. And there was a thing he asked me.
He said… It was the first time I ever heard him cry — when he called me before I went to see this happen, take place, whatever. It was the first time. He was in Vietnam before I was born, and when he showed up at my house I had Apocalypse Now on the projector on my wall paused right there when he walked in, which was awkward.
He had just arrived. His father did kill strangers. And Manson, and his mother, lived with the aftermath. In the same way as the character that Martin Sheen plays in Apocalypse Now. I think my father was selected to do a job. He never talked to me about it. When you realise that he spent the first 18 years of his life in a household dominated by the after-effects of violence, Marilyn Manson and his music, his obsessions, his sense of alienation, his fascination with killing, his insistence on living outside the strictures of mainstream American society, suddenly makes much more sense.
His father had told him not to write. And he went to journalism college anyway. There was Marilyn Manson, but there was no music yet. You, Brian, gave them all to Marilyn Manson? So now we can go on to more cheerful things. How he lashed out at his mother as a teenager.
How he was sent to a Christian school he hated. How he was beaten up by other children who thought he was gay. How his grandfather was allegedly into bestiality.
But he has not, to my knowledge, talked about the effect of the hows and whys of it. It reminds me of Sam Shepard , literary high priest of dysfunctional American families, who I once interviewed and who told me a very similar story of his father returning from the Second World War in trauma, unable to relate to his family, and the impact that the violence had on everyone else.
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