If not for the panic he inspired in various authority figures, he wouldn’t have been half as cool.Īnd now Manson is back under scrutiny - not for his onstage antics, but for his offline transgressions. Here was a musician who expressed all the rage, the fear, the nihilistic hopelessness that we felt but couldn’t give voice to, and the fact that our parents found him terrifying only added to the allure. Written into every line of Manson’s songs was the promise of catharsis. His darkness wasn’t just something we tolerated, brushing aside to enjoy the music the darkness was the point. Listening to Marilyn Manson was about rebellion, an act of proud defiance. (The thing about the puppies wasn’t even original long before Marilyn Manson rose to fame, people spread similar rumors about Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper incorporating animal cruelty into their acts.) But the fact that it seemed possible - at least to the nervous grownups who slapped content warnings on Manson’s CDs and fretted that his music would make kids want to kill themselves - was part of the appeal. Of course, absolutely none of this was true. The music wouldn’t start, people said (here lowering their voices for dramatic effect), until all the puppies were dead. If you were a teen at the time, you would have heard them all, each more sordid than the last: that he’d had his ribs surgically removed so that he could fellate himself, that his fandom was made up of school-shooters and Satan worshippers, that he opened every concert by flinging a sack of kittens and puppies into the crowd. Rumors swirled around Manson and the evil influence he and his music held over impressionable youngsters. It wasn’t just the music itself but the man who made it, and what he seemed to represent.
Once upon a time, back in the late 1990s, Manson was the guy whose albums you hid in your underwear drawer lest your parents find them and freak out. The difference is in who’s doing the canceling - and that this time, it seems it might actually stick. But the strangest renaissance in this throwback moment is a moral panic: Marilyn Manson, the creepy goth-rocker with a startling appearance and a voice like synthesized nails on a chalkboard, is once again up for cancellation. Bootcut jeans and birkenstocks are back old Nickelodeon classic cartoons are being rebooted for a new generation. In a world gripped by Nineties nostalgia, everything old is new again.
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