As we enter the new millennium, the gender gap seems to be narrowing. Images of masculine and feminine beauty look increasingly similar. While male film stars, most notably Leonardo DiCaprio, are increasingly androgynous in appearance, their female equivalents seem to be chosen for features and figures reminiscent of an adolescent boy. Voluptuous sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe would have trouble launching their careers in the 1990s, while Mae West, the original blonde bombshell, would never get past the casting couch today. Marilyn Manson, who plays outrageously with sexual ambiguity, can obviously be seen as the next step in this cultural preoccupation with gender bending – but that’s only part of the story.
As with drugs, this would appear to be an area where Marilyn Manson is at odds with the philosophies of the Church of Satan and his spiritual mentor, ‘Black Pope’Anton LaVey. The Church of Satan was founded in the mid-1960s, around the time modern feminism was undergoing its genesis. LaVey regarded the movement with dismay, seeing it as yet another drab fad that went against aesthetics and nature. While portrayed as a move towards liberation, in LaVey’s cosmology feminism was just another aspect of the blurring of gender distinctions that began in the 1960s. Whether it was youth cults like the hippies, with their unisex clothes and long hair, or fashion models like Twiggy, who deliberately fostered a boyish look, the 1960s were characterised by androgyny. And LaVey did not approve.
He saw the real engine behind this trend not as liberty but the pressure to conform. Corporate America wants good consumers, and consumers who all want the same thing are the easiest to satisfy. So homogenisation is actively, if covertly, encouraged, and all marks of difference and distinction, including those of gender, must gradually be eroded. Feminism, as it developed, was not so much a movement celebrating feminine power as an attempt to turn women into second-rate men. Feminists claimed to be seeking equality with men, but, as many post-feminists later came to realise, concepts of sexual equality and sexual individualism are simply incompatible.
The Black Pope’s most public counter-blast against feminism came in his 1970 book The Compleat Witch (later retitled The Satanic Witch), a battle manual for women to use in the war of the sexes. The first chapter finishes with a rule of engagement that LaVey considers so important he puts it in capitals: ‘NEVER FORGET THAT YOU ARE A WOMAN, AND THE GREATEST POWERS YOU CAN EMPLOY AS A WITCH ARE TOTALLY DEPENDENT ON YOUR OWN SELF-REALIZATION THAT IN BEING A WOMAN YOU ARE DIFFERENT FROM A MAN AND THAT VERY DIFFERENCE MUST BE EXPLOITED.’
LaVey’s belief, that men are more potent if masculine and women more powerful if feminine, remains Church of Satan dogma. To the present day, the organisation continues to extol the virtues of the curvaceous, sexually-predatory female, most notably in the work of the pop artist Coop.
Predictably, LaVey was labelled a misogynist – a mantle he willingly accepted, going so far as to publish an essay entitled ‘Confessions of a Closet Misogynist’ in his 1992 collection The Devil’s Notebook. As ever with this ingeniously provocative thinker, there was a twist in the tail: LaVey didn’t hate women but was in awe of their power, treating them with the blend of suspicion, fear and respect afforded to a worthy foe.
His next collection, the posthumously published Satan Speaks!, featured an essay entitled ‘On Women or: Why My Right-Hand Man Must Be a Woman’, in which he declared, ‘I believe woman is the dominant sex, with or without feminist validation.’ A change of direction? Not at all. Ever since he first conducted seminars on witchcraft in the early days of the Church of Satan, LaVey always lauded seductive, spirited women as ‘Satanists’. After all, it was Eve who tempted Adam with the apple in The Bible, and Adam’s oft-forgotten first wife, Lilith, who was ejected from Paradise for her independence and sex drive, fleeing to the wilderness to become Satan’s consort.
So where does Marilyn Manson fit into all this?
LaVey never preached against effeminate men or masculine women – indeed, the Church of Satan’s early membership was a fabulous freakshow expressing individualism in various unique ways, sometimes transcending boundaries of sexuality and gender. What the Black Pope opposed was the sexual halfway-house promoted in the mainstream media, the unisex ideal of the self-consciously sensitive man and crudely aggressive woman. The sexes, said LaVey, should be different, not equal. However, while he railed against the neutering of gender, stressing that a true individual could never be free of either overt masculine or feminine traits, he never said that you couldn’t be both.
In the name of embodying opposing extremes, Marilyn Manson highlights powerful icons of voluptuous womanhood and domineering manhood, in Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Manson. His persona combines elements of traditional masculinity – like his aggressive stage performances – with characteristics traditionally associated with femininity, such as his flamboyant dress and make-up. Asked once if he was a transvestite, Marilyn responded that ‘a transvestite is a man that dresses like a woman, but I think that I’m a composite of both male and female. I’m not trying to look like a woman – I’m trying to look like something that is both.’ It’s a stance that some members of the Church of Satan (including, to an extent, LaVey, who refused to address him as ‘Marilyn’) were uncomfortable with, but it didn’t contradict their central ethos of radical individualism.
Marilyn Manson’s incarnation as an extraterrestrial on Mechanical Animals was more problematic, from a satanic point-of-view. While previously he had embodied both powerful male and female characteristics, he now seemed to be sailing dangerously close to the sexual no-man’s-land LaVey abhorred. Interestingly, his new image was a hybrid of alien and angel – evocative of the medieval religious paintings of Lucifer cast from Heaven by St. Michael, aided by strikingly androgynous angels. While the forces of evil in these paintings have prominent male and female genitals (and often both), their virtuous, desexed foes look almost like angelic shop-window mannequins. Just as the grey aliens of modern myth – which believers hope will save the earth – are sexless, almost featureless in appearance, so the angels our ancestors prayed to for salvation were inhumanly genderless. Marilyn himself claims that Mechanical Animals is about Jesus in the same way Antichrist Superstar was about Lucifer. It’s difficult not to wonder whether he’s suggesting the idea of Jesus as a sexually-neutered eunuch messiah, considered holy by his followers but regarded with contempt by sensually-inclined Satanists.
Asked whether his image was becoming more feminine, Marilyn responded, ‘More androgynous. At the same time more sexless too – all of the details are stripped. Feminine and vulnerable, I suppose . . . it’s about getting completely sexual, completely sexless at the same time.’ How his sexless alien-androgyne persona could be considered ‘completely sexual’ is far from clear.
Like Anton LaVey, Marilyn Manson has subverted accusations of misogyny by declaring himself to have been a misogynist. The most damning evidence is provided by the accused: in The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, he recalls how the young Brian Warner would steal money and private notes from girls at the Christian Heritage School, not just for financial reward or information, but also the satisfaction of causing distress among his female targets. He later describes a girl who worked at the local mall who he lusted after, but considered unobtainable, making recourse to what he describes as ‘malicious, asinine behaviour’ with a series of threatening prank calls. Marilyn admits he was fully aware of the distress he was causing – not least because his campaign of harassment echoed the one that Nancy had earlier conducted against him.
Nancy was the girl he identified with the Devil during his first, prophetic acid trip. She was part of the early Marilyn Manson stageshow, indulging in sex acts while being subjected to increasingly grotesque physical abuse by the singer, duly falling in love with her onstage abuser. (One of Nietzsche’s most notorious dictums – ‘You are going to women – do not forget the whip!’ – echoes sinisterly in the background.)
SEXUAL CHEMISTRY
Baphomet - a form of the devil popularised by the nineteenth-century French occultist Eliphas Levi.
Perhaps the most familiar occult androgyne – a figure that unites or transcends the two sexes – is the image of Satan as a goat-headed creature with woman’s breasts and an erect penis. Commonly referred to as Baphomet, this image of the Devil has both male and female organs to emphasise his status as a lord of carnal lust and earthly pleasure. The original ‘god of fuck’, if you will.
The androgyne is very important in many occult traditions. Alchemists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, who attempted to turn base metals like lead into gold, were also searching for a way to render the human soul into its purest form. The androgyne, or hermaphrodite, was of great significance to the symbolic language of the alchemist, representing transcendence of the limitations that bind a human being to a specific gender.
The name of Marilyn Manson’s latest persona, Mercury, refers to the alchemical element that was, according to some secret teachings, purer than gold. The literal essence of transformation and perfection, according to one eighteenth century German text, Mercury is ‘beginning, middle and end, it is the copulator, the priest who brings all things together and conjoins them’. ‘It represents both the androgyne and the prima materia,’ explained Marilyn when introducting his new insignia/identity, ‘which is then associated with Adam, the first man.’
Even Missi, the girl later identified by Marilyn as the most important person in his life, is roped into one of his macabre pranks. They begin going out together at the same time that Florida is being terrorised by a brutal serial killer who targets young girls, dubbed the Gainseville Slasher by the press. (The killer, Danny Rolling, would later write his memoirs – published as The Making of a Serial Killer by Feral House, publishers of much of Anton LaVey’s work.) More than a little tastelessly, Marilyn saw the activities of the killer as an opportunity for a morbid practical joke – shooting a series of intimate polaroids of his girlfriend Missi, made-up to look as if they were photos of a sexually abused corpse. The gory, sexually explicit shots were discarded in public places, to be chanced upon by any hapless concerned citizen.
DRESSED TO KILL
There is a curious connection between killers and cross-dressing a connection illustrated by three of the murderers incorporated by Marilyn Manson band-members into their stage names.
During his traumatic childhood Charlie Manson was, for a time, looked after by his pious aunt and uncle, who insisted the unfortunate kid attend school in a girl’s dress to toughen him up. The story is echoed in the upbringing of Henry Lee Lucas, also in the Southern USA of the 1940s, whose violently abusive mother sent him to school with permed hair and girl’s clothing. The Texan misfit grew up to become an alcoholic drifter, falling in with another feral vagrant named Ottis Toole who had also been dressed as a girl during a fearsomely abusive childhood. When the police apprehended Lucas in 1983 on a firearms charge, he surprised his captors with a mind-blowing catalogue of confessions, detailing an orgy of torture, rape and murder that had taken him across America with his partner and lover Toole. However much or however little of his confessions may have been true, Henry Lee Lucas’ notoriety inspired erstwhile Marilyn Manson drummer Sara Lee Lucas to adopt half his name.
Perhaps the most bizarre transvestite killer was Ed Gein, who inspired the Manson moniker Gidget Gein. Possibly guilty of only two murders and numerous acts of grave robbery, the sheer grotesquerie of his crimes assured the criminal a place in American folklore and serial murder studies. Brought up by a domineering, religious mother, Ed grew into a socially retarded handyman in the isolated Wisconsin community in which he lived. When his mother died, Gein’s eccentricities seemed to multiply, though none of his neighbours guessed just how far.
He was arrested in 1957, when the body of a local woman was found hung in his shed and gutted like a deer. The details of his crimes were largely suppressed as too horrible for public consumption at the time, but were later absorbed into popular legend. Perhaps the most bizarre was Gein’s propensity for draping himself in the skin of dead women and cavorting about beneath the moon. This memorable image inspired classic horror movies as diverse in style as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs all emphasising different aspects of Gein’s gruesome obsession with female flesh. In Silence . . . , Gein was the prototype for the loathsome Buffalo Bill character, a sexual ‘skin transvestite’, while Psycho’s Norman Bates was a cross-dressing momma’s boy who kept Mom’s stuffed corpse in the cellar, very different from Leatherface, the brutally subhuman man behind the mask-of-flesh in Chainsaw . . . , who lived, Gein-style, in a farmhouse decorated with human body parts.
KISS THIS!
Marilyn Manson’s fondness for impromptu exhibitionism means his trousers rarely stay up for an entire performance. Whether he’s wiping it on a Bible, the American flag, or simply displaying his butt to the audience, it’s fair to say his fans are more familiar with Marilyn’s ass than he is. One of the dominant images of the 1990s is of this slender performer mooning at America – from a Freudian viewpoint, feeding the USA’s anal fixation.
There is a traditional connection between ‘anal’ and ‘evil’: showing somebody your backside has always been an insult, even in ancient times. Anal sex is still illegal in many places and remains a taboo, a dirty, wholly non-procreative sex act – one in the eye for Christianity, which preaches that all sex for pleasure, rather than procreation, is sinful. Back in the tenth century, a heretical Christian sect called the Bogomils, who practised anal sex because they thought procreation itself was sinful, inspired the word ‘buggery’. According to medieval tradition, Satan’s ass was his best feature – illustrations from this time usually picture him with a face on his behind. Witches were supposed to adore their satanic master by kissing him on the backside, a practice known as the ‘osculum infame’ (‘obscene kiss’), or kiss of shame.
Asked if he was popular with girls as a teenager, the Antichrist Superstar responded candidly, ‘I liked them but I didn’t have much luck with them. I went through a bit of a misogynist period, because I was resentful that I didn’t have any luck and I had a big heartbreak, but then I turned to writing and started the band, and that became my escape from worrying about girls. When you listen to our early songs, there are a lot of spiteful lyrics about relationships which come from that period.’
Ultimately, accusations of misogyny may be deflected by his adoption of a partly feminine persona. Would a man who hated women adopt some of their characteristics with such enthusiasm? The themes of abuse inherent in Marilyn Manson are about a series of human conflicts, not just the war between the sexes, and recognising that it cuts both ways. ‘I’ve grown up,’ the band’s leader observes on the topic of abuse and misogyny. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever misused anyone because of their looks. People have to choose a role in life. Either they’re a user or they’re someone who will be used, and those people should just be thankful that they’re even useful.’ (Echoing LaVey’s dictum that it’s better to be used than useless.)
Inevitably, however, Marilyn’s toying with gender led many to speculate about his sexuality. ‘I’m playing with the subject,’ he once commented. ‘People tend to be so uptight about it. I just wanted to make it less of a taboo. And at the end of the rules, it states that I’ve broken all of them. A lot of people are afraid to talk about or address homosexuality – and there’s always so many rumours directed towards me and my sexuality.’
Public displays like giving a blow-job to a member of Nine Inch Nails on stage did little to discourage these rumours. ‘People’s fears start to come out when you do something like that,’ Manson observed. ‘A lot of macho guys started calling me “faggot”, wanted to start a fight with me. Why would they want to fight me because I did that? Obviously it scared them. I’m confident enough with my sexuality where I can do something like that. Anyone who knows me, knows I like girls.’ So why invite the rumours?
The answer only partly lies in the response his behaviour inspires. When asked whether invoking homosexuality as a taboo didn’t reinforce the prejudice that it was ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’, Marilyn responded, ‘I perceive decadence and “evil”, quote/unquote, as a good thing. So when I perpetuate it and slap it in the face of conservative people, it’s like these things are the things that I like, and these are the things that I find entertaining and fulfilling. And I know it makes you mad, and I want you to be mad, because I enjoy it. And I want them to be pissed off that I enjoy it. I don’t just use it as a button to push. Because, you see, it’s not just “What can I do next to make them mad?” It’s not something that I wouldn’t do anyway at home just for my own enjoyment, because I’ve done plenty of things that people haven’t heard about, just for kicks, that I wasn’t doing, you know, to piss someone off.’
But there’s more to his interest in gender taboos than a desire to shock. Freudian analysis might locate its origins way back in the childhood of Brian Warner. The story that opens his autobiography – of his illicit visits to the cellar where his grandfather indulges his unusual sexual habits – clearly had a great impact. The old man used a dildo and, as the boy later discovered, wore women’s underwear under his work clothes, coming to light when Grandfather Jack was involved in an accident while working as a trucker and had to be taken to hospital.
When he was eight or nine years old, Marilyn recalls in his autobiography, an older neighbourhood boy named Mark who coerced him into playing ‘prison’ – a dubious-sounding game whereby Brian would squeeze into a dumbwaiter, naked because the imaginary guards would not allow the inmates even the most basic of comforts. Once crammed into their claustrophobic ‘cell’, Marilyn claims his cellmate Mark would caress him and try to play with young Brian’s dick.
However traumatic these early experiences may have been, the origins of Marilyn Manson can once more be traced to the Christian Heritage School, where the young misfit used his teachers’ blacklist of forbidden records as a source of recommendations. He recalls that his Christian tutors reserved special condemnation for Queen, notably because they regarded the band’s song ‘We Are the Champions’ as a gay anthem, and because, they maintained, it contained the words ‘My Sweet Satan’ if played backwards. Other bands with perceived or authentic homosexual connections were also forbidden to the pupils, with vocalists like David Bowie and Adam Ant portrayed as illustrating the axis between homosexuality and evil.
TRANSVESTITES AND TRANSGRESSIVES
By no means do all cross-dressers choose to cross the gender gap to demonstrate their homosexuality. In fact, many transvestites are greatly offended at suggestions that they adopt feminine garb because they’re gay. In the entertainment and artistic worlds, the motive is often to deliberately challenge accepted ideas about gender and identity. There’s nothing new in using cross-dressing to challenge social taboo. Christmas has its origins in a pagan Ancient Roman winter festival named Saturnalia, which the Christians adapted for their own purposes. Saturnalia, however, was originally a celebration of fun and mischief in the face of the grim winter season, where many taboos and customs were overturned for a day and men dressed as women.
In modern pop-culture, this same flouting of convention is alive and well. The Rolling Stones, archetypal bad boys of 1960s rock’n’roll, outraged the establishment with their outrageous camp which reached a peak with the cover art for the 1966 single ‘Have You Seen Your Mother Baby?’, featuring the band dressed as rather unprepossessing women. At the same time, pop artist Andy Warhol, who later became an influential figure on the fringes of the glam-rock scene, was welcoming transvestites into his New York ‘Factory’ to appear in art-house movies like Trash. In the following decade, cult trash director John Waters would try to make the glamorously grotesque transvestite Divine into a star in such cinematic gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living (both later plundered for samples by Marilyn Manson.)
The most outrageous cross-dresser to emerge from Warhol’s Factory was Wayne County (later Jayne County). County was a performer in his (her) own right, best remembered for the songs ‘Are You Man Enough To Be a Woman?’ and ‘(If You Don’t Wanna Fuck Me, Baby) Fuck Off ’. It was County’s live show that was most memorable, however. According to a 1971 review in Crawdaddy magazine, it took New York’s embryonic androgynous gender-bending scene ‘to its logical conclusion . . . County’s act is carried on in total drag; he wears a plastic cunt with straw hair, sucks off a large dildo, shoots “come” at the audience with a plastic squirt gun, and for an encore eats dogfood out of a toilet bowl . . . while these groups and their fans on this burgeoning scene profess to be parodying or “camping on” various sexual styles (bisexuality, transvestism, sadomasochism), it is difficult to say where affectation ends and reality begins.’
However, few cross-dressing phenomena have achieved the same cult kudos as Tim Curry playing the ‘sweet transvestite from Transexual Transylvania’, Dr Frank N. Furter, the anti-hero of the hit musical/cult movie The Rocky Horror Show. Marilyn has described the lingerie-clad Curry as ‘a hot number. I would have liked him to shave his armpits though. I’m not big on them. I have mine. I can’t even look at myself with armpit hair. Disgusting!’ Ostensibly a camp send-up of cheap horror and science fiction movies, The Rocky Horror Show carries a mischievous subtext that makes outrageous sexual perversity look like fun, while conformity is overtly dull and depressing. The cinematic version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, has long been a cult hit, with countless fans, male and female, attending performances in fishnet-stocking drag to get into the spirit of things. Its blend of campy gothic horror with sexual fetishism also made it a big favourite among the gothic subculture.
Tim Curry camps it up as Dr Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Contrary to what modern liberal Christians would have you believe, God hates homosexuals and cross-dressers – at least, that’s what it says in The Bible. The Book of Leviticus states that, ‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’The Book of Deuteronomy commands, ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abominations unto the Lord thy God.’
According to rock journalist Albert Goldman, the 1970s saw a revival of the Decadent movement. ‘By whatever mysterious underground channels the decadent sensibility has been conveyed from nineteenth century Paris and London to twentieth century New York,’ he wrote in 1974. ‘The fact is that we are living unconsciously, inadvertently, rather casually, the dread, degenerate, opium-dream existence fantasised by radical writers a hundred years ago. Everybody’s walking around in crushed velvet and Parisian brothel boots. People’s faces are painted up like Toulouse-Lautrec demimondaines. They’re as languorous as dandies, as jaded as aesthetes, as narcoleptic as absinthe drinkers.’
While Goldman was wrong inasmuch as the more radical Decadents of the nineteenth century did more than just fantasise their lifestyles, there were definitely parallels with the 1970s. This particular scene was known, in its English birthplace, as ‘glam’. Its chief pioneer was Marc Bolan, a singer with effeminately elfin good looks whose androgynous style (including feather boas and glitter jackets) helped propel him to stardom. According to his producer, Tony Visconti, ‘There was a place in the World’s End that sold clothes that were considered kind of kitsch. That famous chartreuse satin jacket with the music notes embroidered on it – this was pure kitsch, and musicians weren’t really dressing like that yet. Marc took it very seriously and started walking around like that. I don’t remember anyone before him wearing those vivid colours.’
Many trace the birth of the movement to a 1971 performance by Bolan’s band, T. Rex, on the UK TV show Top of the Pops. He performed with heavy eye make-up and glitter sprinkled on his perfect cheekbones. Bolan’s manager David Enthovan recalls, ‘As soon as he got on TV, basically it all took off. Marc definitely started it. He was the first to put glitter on his face, and I think it had a lot to do with his wife. June had the vision about how to present this little pixie. It was definitely a team.’ Bolan was soon joined by another Englishman – his friend and rival David Bowie, whose wife and early inspiration, Angie, had a flair for androgynous chic. While Bolan was the consummate pop star, sparkling and pretty but devoid of substance, Bowie’s survival instinct inspired him to constantly change, going through a bewildering array of artistic incarnations.
In the early 1970s Bowie decamped to the USA, encountering New York’s caustic but vibrant young art and music scene – as well as the androgynes of Andy Warhol’s Factory. In America at this point, ‘glitter rock’ was the common description for the new, flamboyantly androgynous rock’n’roll. As Bebe Buell, a veteran of the New York scene, recalls, the US scene developed along more aggressive lines, into an underground that gave birth to the nascent US punk scene rather than a mainstream commercial craze. ‘It was a marriage of punk and glitter, whereas in Britain it was either punk or glitter. You see, the street life of Manhattan was the wild side. The only thing you could compare it to was pre-war Berlin.’
While touring to promote the seminal glam album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, the highly-strung Bowie began to go through another transformation. According to Barney Hoskyns in his book Glam!, Bowie’s mind was ‘teeming with cartoon visions of catastrophe. The songs turned America – the America of ‘Panic in Detroit’ and ‘Drive-in Saturday’ [both from the follow-up album to Ziggy, Aladdin Sane] – into a surreal, polysexual playground, a nation of neon and Quaaludes, a place at once depraved and coldly alienating . . . It suggested a mind teetering on the edge of psychosis, writing under pressure, writhing beneath the spotlight of media attention.’ (The parallels here with Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals are unmistakable.) In May of 1973, however, Bowie, turned his back on the glam scene he helped create, declaring to the British music paper Melody Maker, ‘This whole decadence thing is a bloody joke. I’m very normal.’
Even though its innovators were moving on, numerous bands continued to carry glam rock’s lurid torch through the 1970s. One reason was that, contrary to the initial fears of many wanna-be rock stars, androgyny did not discourage groupies – in fact, quite the reverse. In contrast to the world of nineteenth-century decadence, when androgynes were usually misogynists, the 1970s saw women becoming increasingly comfortable with androgynous or gay men. Brian Eno, electronic prankster with influential early glam band Roxy Music, was known for his outrageously effeminate dress sense.
‘Women always seemed to get on with gays,’ Eno later reflected, ‘and I think it’s slightly like that. It’s a feeling that there is someone who is other but who is not threatening, who has surrendered their authority and their ability to command by strength. If you’re gay or you’re androgynous, you’re not playing that usual male role of “I’m the tough one here.” She knows that this guy isn’t playing the male . . . There was a whole kind of negative movement at the same time saying either men were terrible or women were pathetic, and I thought, “Why not just be neither of them? Why not side-step the whole argument by becoming something else, something in between?” I think that’s a strong position. And of course it’s a position that a lot of people have generally adopted – the New Man is a slightly feminized man, basically.’
Glam lost its outrageous edge as it became acceptable. In the US, KISS borrowed some of the look but adapted it to heavy metal, turning theatrical androgyny into the aggressive, air-headed machismo of 1980s glam-metal bands who incongruously blended hair-spray with testosterone. In the UK, glam introduced androgyny into mainstream pop, opening the door for flamboyantly camp singers like Freddie Mercury of Queen to play to huge, largely homophobic audiences seemingly unaware of the band name’s gay subtext. (Something of a barometer for public attitudes to homosexuality, Queen began their career as a glam band, while Mercury, the only bisexual member, only made his sexual preferences public when the band hit the big time.) By the 1980s, chart success was enjoyed by the subversively inoffensive Culture Club, with their cross-dressing singer Boy George. Discussing glam’s heritage, Barney Hoskyns observes, ‘Boy George’s secret lay in taking the androgyny of glam a stage further, turning himself into a kind of cuddly eunuch. More influential was the female androgyny of the Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox, which did for white pop what Grace Jones had done for black disco: more audacious was the pervy “deviance” of Soft Cell’s Marc Almond.’
SCARY MONSTERS AND SPACE ODDITIES
David Bowie, as an artist, has both influenced and been a point of comparison for Marilyn Manson. Born David Jones in London, 1947, his determination to achieve pop stardom took him through various early incarnations as a hippie, mod and cabaret singer, all well-promoted commercial failures. It wasn’t until he hitched himself to the embryonic glam scene that this striking, androgynous performer truly began his climb to stardom.
Prior to his commercial breakthrough, the 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World, a darkly brooding record with heavy metal flourishes, boasted the singer lounging on the cover in a dress. It set the tone for much of the ensuing decade with its decadent themes of sexual deviance, decay and insanity, influenced by the darkest elements of Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche (figures who would loom large in the world of Marilyn Manson two decades later).
These same occultic and philosophical influences bled into the more melodic, sugar-coated 1971 follow-up Hunky Dory, but it failed to achieve the commercial success his label anticipated. Around the time of the album’s release, however, Bowie’s off-the-cuff admission of bisexuality made him a hot item with the press. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was his big breakthrough, an album which successfully married his artistic pretensions, unique vision and talent for theatrical display with infectiously catchy songs. Apocalyptic, futuristic, decadent, the singer took on the persona of the title character, a rock star whose internal destruction mirrored the collapse of the world around him, predating Marilyn Manson’s take on the same themes by a quarter-of-a-century. The apocalyptic tenor of Ziggy Stardust cut close to the bone for Bowie, who began suffering under the increasing pressures of stardom and rock excess during the recording of his next outing, Aladdin Sane (a lad insane), which haunts the same fractured territory.
The 1974 recording Diamond Dogs featured a three-song cycle loosely based on George Orwell’s novel 1984 - a depiction of life in a grim totalitarian state in the near future – alongside material inspired by cult science fiction author Harlan Ellison and drug-culture icon William Burroughs. The prolific vocalist continued to produce albums that showcased his adaptability, from ‘plastic rhythm and blues’ (Young Americans, 1975) to futuristically-tinged soul ballads (Station to Station, 1976) and austere semi-instrumental works (Low, 1977). Aware of rock’s ephemeral obsession with youth, Bowie expanded into other media in the 1980s, refusing to rest on his laurels as a pop icon. He pursued an acting career (most notably in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence and The Hunger, both 1983), recorded movie soundtracks, indulged in a number of improbable duets (his Bing Crosby collaboration raising a few eyebrows) and recorded some upbeat material that finally divorced him from his decadent golden years.
Nevertheless, Bowie’s importance as a pioneer in the musical worlds of danceable despair and futuristic frustration was acknowledged in 1995 when Trent Reznor accompanied him on tour, yielding the headline spot to Bowie when Nine Inch Nails were transparently the bigger draw. The New York Times observed that, ‘While Bowie and Reznor are kindred performers in some ways, they are polar opposites in others. Reznor is an explosive introvert, ranting and agonising over his private torments while Nine Inch Nails hammers blunt, primal riffs. It’s clear what’s on his mind. Bowie, by contrast, is a detached observer, parcelling out disconnected hints and images, moving in and out of the stories he suggests. His songs are more abstract, even at their most impassioned.’
On Mechanical Animals, Marilyn Manson made no attempt to hide the heavy influence of Bowie in his 1970s heyday. Interestingly, the Bowie project most effectively evoked is not a recording but his haunting 1976 feature-film debut, The Man Who Fell To Earth. Bowie starred as an alien who comes to earth, hoping to transport water back to his dying desert home planet. The science fiction story is only a metaphor, however, Bowie’s alien persona expressing earthly symptoms of alienation – alienation that the singer himself felt as a result of his celebrity status, with all the fragmentation and chemical over-indulgence that accompanied it. The parallels with Mechanical Animals are striking: particularly the vision of Bowie as the de-sexed alien in the film, and Marilyn Manson as the androgynous extraterrestrial on the album’s cover.
David Bowie in glam rock mode.
Marilyn Manson, who describes Queen’s 1977 album News of the World as one of his favourite records, would later guardedly confess to meeting Boy George. Underlining the inane innocuousness of the prancing prima donna, he explained, ‘My mom loves Boy George. My mom writes him love letters. He gave my mom his address and she won’t stop obsessing about him. She doesn’t think he’s gay. She thinks she’s got a shot at it.’
While trite little pop queen Boy George had little impact on the cultural landscape, Marilyn Manson would create shockwaves felt far beyond the entertainment industry. After their cover of androgyne pop diva Annie Lennox’s ‘Sweet Dreams’ introduced the band to a broader public, and the huge success of Antichrist Superstar, the band looked back to their 1970s childhoods for inspiration. The resultant third album, Mechanical Animals, dispensed with the harsh, caustic sound of their earlier material in favour of a more accessible, yet deliberately cold and hollow approach. ‘This sound reflects the feeling in the record – more dynamic and more melodic – to evoke what I’m speaking of. And the music that did that for me as a kid was Queen, David Bowie, Prince, Kiss . . . T. Rex,’ he enthused.
It wasn’t just the glam sound of the 1970s and early 1980s that Marilyn wanted to evoke, but its spirit. Glam had been a reaction to the drab worthiness of the music scene at the time. Rock music was dominated by predictable country-rock outfits dressed in denim, and pretentious post-hippie performers with earnest lyrics and acoustic guitars. Glam brought bombastic fun back into rock’n’roll, re-energising it with a splash of colour and glorious irresponsibility. In the 1990s, the Reverend Manson evangelised the same kind of tackiness that rocked the music business two decades back. ‘Look at it this way,’ he explained, ‘grunge killed stardom, all the musicians wanted to be ordinary people, just like their fans. We are the complete opposite; we wanted to bring the glamour and personality back, the showmanship. Grunge never interested me. I wanted theatricality, a big statement and that required an image that had to be extreme . . .’
Of course, Marilyn Manson brought their own distinctive approach to glam rock, with some elements on Mechanical Animals that were bleaker than Bowie at his most apocalyptic. Omega, Marilyn Manson’s answer to Ziggy Stardust, is as unsettling as he is seductive. ‘I was imagining Omega to be the most exaggerated extension of what the Antichrist Superstar was,’ he explained, ‘everything that glam rock has ever been and then some. To me glam rock has always meant a very sarcastic and over-the-top flamboyant image that was hiding something that was darker and more depressing underneath. That was always the irony of glam rock to me.’