Marilyn Hanson

Marilyn Manson is probably the luckiest person in the world. Teenagers, for whose teenage years there was no next Nirvana, provided him with money for the rest of his life. The music press, which employs mostly sane people, is mainly interested in the number of his ribs, and prefers not to seriously touch the music. Only sick-headed Network Baptists, the local governments of Mormon cities like Salt Lake City, and the stunted Ku Klux Klan consider it necessary to lay down their lives to fight him and read the lyrics of his songs. Manson today is the same successful targeted PR product that the singing Hanson brothers were a couple of years ago and how the mummified Michael Jackson remains: it’s not for nothing that in the recent Dutch film Do Not Disturb, Jackson and Manson were synthesized in a funny way into one person - the boy Billy from the Manson group five.

By and large, Manson, despite all the guitar fuzz, heart-rending vocals and lyrics about girls who have their jaws fastened with metal wire so that they do not bite off too much to passers-by, is closer to boy bands than to the uncompromising metalheads of bygone years. On the ideological level, it is rooted not so much in the satanic metal tradition, personified by the most worthy O. Osborne, E. Cooper and others, but in the accursed Seattle grunge of the late 80s with its ideological self-destruction, musical sloppiness and life credo expressed by the phrase "in spite of I'll freeze my mom's finger." Osbourne, Cooper and even quite pop from today's point of view Kiss, to whose concerts the overly liberal mother took little Brian Warner, were supermen and masters of minds, steel people without fear, reproach and complexes about their appearance: they tore gaping bats with their teeth, and then courageously lay in intensive care with mouse blood poisoning.

Manson is from a different breed. He is a "superman on the contrary": a squishy, ​​weakling, sissy, a broken ugly boy who was not strangled with a pillow at one time (this really happened: in his very early childhood, a night robber tried to strangle Manson, he himself does not remember this case, but since then always sleeps with the light on and with the TV on). Manson’s desire to write off personal psychological problems, sexual frustration and the lack of a chin to a tough consumer society, big corporations, the Lord God and the US government, which at one time sent Manson’s dad to flood the Vietnamese jungle with napalm and spray “agent orange” with napalm, is also related to Manson’s grungers.

It seems quite logical that Trent Reznor, a man from that very "Seattle clip" pulled out of the hinterland of Manson (once Kurt Cobain, Billy Korgen and Reznor walked in the same sweaters, smoked bulls one after another and took turns taking young Courtney Love to the corner ), who then had the sense to take a step aside and turn from an acting musician into an ideologist, compiler and measure. It was Reznor's Nothing Records in the early '90s that propelled the Fort Lauderdale, Florida band of urban lunatics into a well-moneyed international outrage.

In a Catholic school, where his parents, modest furniture dealers, sent him, Manson speculated in compacts: he bought hard music CDs for classmates who were forbidden by their parents to enter rock stores, and then stole them from the lockers in the locker room. Lockers in the boarding school were not locked, as it was believed that Christian youth did not steal from each other. To Manson, such naivety seemed the height of idiocy. To this day, he is sincerely convinced that, by purging his classmates, he carried out extremely useful educational work: he showed people that it is shameful and unprofitable to be suckers. His current occupation, if you think about it, is not so different from stealing CDs.

Manson is a fairly typical representative of the modern legalized Satanism: the phenomenon of toothless, unintelligent and for the most part rather scam. Even his vaunted apocalyptic dreams, which he regularly retells to The Rolling Stone magazine (also a trademark American disease - to use the mass media instead of a psychoanalyst), are surprisingly uninventive and look like a clumsy retelling of bad Stephen King adaptations: the atomic bomb fell, everyone died, I stayed. And, on the other hand, attempts to explain to housewives that "for the vast majority of today, Satan symbolizes not so much evil as some kind of alternative way of thinking, anti-mainstream and anti-corporate way of thinking, if you will." No animals were harmed during the black mass.