I used to have nightmares about the Antichrist. The formula has sold nearly 5 million albums. The persona he assumes-he never breaks character in public-is a distinctly unsettling, sexually indeterminate blend of pancake makeup, bondage gear, lipstick, mascara, and religious imagery. His songs are laced with nihilism ("All your infants in abortion cribs/I was born into this/Everything turns to sh-t") and blasphemy ("When I’m God everybody dies"). And it must be said that his message isn't always clear. It is Manson's fascination with violence (which, he points out, we get in a constant stream from many sources) that raises hackles. Rather than face life's confusing freedom and difficult choices, Manson says, people disown their humanity to become, as one of his album titles puts it, "mechanical animals." The Manson critique includes a highly theatrical brand of bone-crunching, guitar-driven rock & roll and lyrics that harshly denounce the crushing effects of conformity. "Marilyn Manson is a criticism of gimmickry," he once explained to me, "while being itself a gimmick."
Manson points out that his act only uses the tools made available to him by the media machine. What is perhaps most surprising about Manson is how deeply engaged he has been in religious topics, and how genuinely he wants to confront those who are likely to fiercely disagree with him. He's also aware that talking about the spiritual premises and implications of his music and his own complex religious upbringing in a setting like Beliefnet is to jump into a fiery furnace. Manson isn't naïve about the implications of changing your name from Brian Warner to Marilyn Manson-a conflation of his obsessions with sex, violence, and celebrity-or of making albums titled "Antichrist Superstar" (1996) or last year's "Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)." He's well aware that people might conclude you're out to stir up trouble. He went on to attack the media's ghoulish fascination with the murders: "I was dumbfounded as I watched the media snake right in, not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of dead children, televising the funerals. "A lot of people forget or never realize that I started my band as a criticism of these very issues of despair and hypocrisy," he wrote. At the time, I worked with Manson on a piece he wrote for Rolling Stone magazine to defend himself. In the wake of Columbine, Manson was attacked as an indirect cause of the shooting-even though it was later shown that the killers were not Manson fans.
The same can be said for his views of the media. In this Beliefnet interview, in which Manson recollects childhood nightmares about the Antichrist and attending services by evangelist Ernest Ainsley, he shows that his dispute with Christianity is as much reaction as provocation. Perhaps no figure in modern culture is as famous or reviled for his use of religious imagery as Marilyn Manson.