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The
prosecutors of Don Smith know nothing about art
Manson: Real
and fake
BY MARIAN LIU, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS,
July 24, 2003
Monster, menace, provocateur,
poseur? Marilyn Manson hopes to remain a mystery.
Staying "a creative question
mark, not an answer" is his goal, says the metal headliner,
who performs with 20 other acts, including Ozzy Osbourne, at
the Ozzfest at DTE Energy Music Theatre today and Friday.
"People always want it
to be an answer, but it's a question mark, because it makes people
think," continues Manson (born Brian Warner). "It makes
some people shocked; it makes some people happy. But it seems
to always make people think, and that's what is fun to do."
After moving from his native
Ohio to Tampa, Fla., Warner worked briefly as a music journalist
before evolving into the leader of a band. The group Marilyn
Manson was born in 1989.
"I think that what I do
still is journalism in a way," says Manson from his home
in Hollywood. "Art is . . . giving people your opinion on
the world. . . . I didn't find that anyone had the right answers
that I was looking for, or had anything to say that was interesting.
So I had to do it myself."
"I was my first interview,"
he says. "I thought that I was great."
Talking to the 34-year-old
rocker is like attempting to pull back the curtain to reveal
the force behind the Wizard of Oz.
Manson claims, however, his
art is his life -- as well as his politics and religion.
"I'm strangely, completely
fake and completely real at the same time, because I wear makeup,
and I dye my hair. I have tattoos," says Manson. "Everything
about me doesn't exist in nature. But at the same time, knowing
that makes me much more real than if you're living a lie. I just
have a very different outlook on what's normal and what's not."
Sounding cool, collected and
calculated, he seems nothing like the "Antichrist Superstar,"
as the band's inflammatory 1996 breakthrough album was titled.
Though his stage persona is titillating, gender-bending and demonic,
his conversation is mild and polite, as he alternates words and
sniffles, suffering through a cold but surviving, as he puts
it.
Manson's latest album, "he
Golden Age of Grotesque," released in May, reached No. 1
on the Billboard charts but quickly fell. The disc is a sexually
charged metal mix that pretends to be cabaret music. Its liner-note
photos look as if they came from Weimar-era Germany.
He says his Ozzfest performance
will follow the same line, with "a bit of 1920s Berlin combined
with Disneyland on acid. . . . There's chorus lines of girls
kicking, naked Siamese twins playing piano and, of course, I
like to transform to the worst leader of the club at the end,
to make Mickey Mouse look really nice compared to me," Manson
says.
As for the many strange and
outrageous stories about him, Manson maintains that some are
true, others not. He chuckles about the one saying he had some
of his ribs removed, insisting it was a false rumor that grew
out of his affinity for wearing corsets onstage. He says he does,
however, apply his own makeup, date a burlesque dancer and drink
absinthe before and after concerts.
Yet in defiance of the shock
rocker label that's often applied to him, Manson insists shocking
people has never been his goal.
"It's what people always
perceive it as, when someone says something I do is shocking,
or they expect me to be shocking," he asserts.
He goes on to say, "It
should be a compliment, in some ways, that something shocks you
in a world that's so saturated with nonsense." Then he adds
cryptically, "I don't look at the word 'misunderstand' or
'misconceive' as applying to what I do, because I want everybody
to understand it and conceive it differently."
Recently, while touring Italy,
Manson says, he was arrested for supposedly tearing off his penis
and throwing it into the crowd. The charge was false, he says,
adding that he had to prove to the Italian police that it hadn't
happened.
In his latest encounter with
American sensitivities, Manson was banned from the Ozzfest tour
stop at Six Flags Darien Lake, near Buffalo, N.Y., because officials
at the park thought his presence would be disruptive.
"Obviously I don't think
it's fair being singled out in a lineup of all bands that play
a certain genre of music," says Manson. "But I think
it also proves that what I do is still considered dangerous,
and that art has to be dangerous."
Copyright © 2003 Detroit
Free Press Inc.
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Truth can never be told so as to be understood,
and not be believ'd.