💀 No 11 - don't put your life in the hands of a shock rock band 💀
Top: Me, third from left, outside the Marilyn Manson concert at the PNE Forum in Vancouver, January 15th, 1997. Bottom: A blurry photo of Manson from the show.
By now, most people have heard about the allegations against Marilyn Manson by his ex-partner Evan Rachel Wood. “He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years,” she wrote earlier this month. Wood confirmed that the unnamed person she’d spoken about in testimony before U.S. Congress in a hearing advocating for a bill of rights for sexual assault survivors in 2018, where she described being subjected to emotional abuse, physical abuse, rape, was indeed the infamous shock rocker. More women have since come forward with similar stories, while Phoebe Bridgers and Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell have recounted their own scummy stories about the singer.
Since this news broke, I’ve been thinking a lot about Marilyn Manson fans. Manson’s cultural currency has waned significantly over the past two decades, his schtick wearing a bit thinner every year. Yet, his impact remains strong. Billie Eilish has name-checked him as an influence, both musical and visual, while everyone from Justin Bieber to Lil Uzi Vert has been spotted wearing a Manson tee in recent years.
More importantly, up until Wood went public with her allegations, many people still cared about Manson, the artist who gave them a voice and understanding, even if they’re not listening to his latest album. The deep connection they made with his music has endured. So, on top of the very serious harm he’s allegedly done to his victims, for fans this news is a particularly painful stab in the back.
Back in high school, I had a Marilyn Manson t-shirt. My friend Dave bought it for me on a family trip to Seattle. I considered myself a fan, but, given that this was the period between Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” and “The Beautiful People,” when he was still on the cusp of breaking through to a mainstream rock audience, I can’t say I understood the full extent of what being a Marilyn Manson fan really meant.
That was put into sharp focus the day a kid in my grade shoved me into a locker door. “You like Marilyn Manson?” he said, before adding, “Fag…” Casual homophobia was common in my high school at the time, so I wasn’t really shocked by either his action or his words. But I was surprised by the catalyst.
For many people, there was something about Marilyn Manson that was deeply unsettling. Conservatives and religious groups were an obvious target, so their objections to his music and overall presentation was a given. But he also triggered a lot of kids in my high school (and, I assume, high schools across North America) who were threatened by the idea that someone might step outside the bounds of the established social order and somehow be rewarded for it. This led to a pre-Internet proliferation of urban legends about Manson –he was actually the child actor who played Paul Pfeiffer on The Wonder Years; he had his bottom ribs surgically removed so he could fellate himself – meant to discredit the singer. For the record, neither was true.
The result was that Marilyn Manson didn’t have a lot of casual fans. In positioning himself as an outsider, Manson made himself a magnet for fans feeling out-of-step with the mainstream. The antipathy that he attracted, and the taunting and abuse his fans experienced from friends, family, peers and their communities, only emboldened their fandom. Liking Marilyn Manson was an us-vs-them choice.
Even if you were like me, a pretty average kid who happened to prefer comic books and alt-rock to sports and hip-hop, you found yourself vehemently defending both him and your fandom. I don’t think Manson necessarily set out to create this dichotomy. Though he was clearly very smart, he always struck me as someone who was more of an opportunist, who liked pushing society’s buttons. But he damn sure knew how to run with it.
As his fame grew, so too did opposition to just about everything he did. Music videos were banned, concerts canceled, and public appearances picketed. When a window broke during an in-store appearance the band did at the A&B Sound in Vancouver, the press described it as a riot (I was there: it was just a bunch of kids bummed that they wouldn’t get to meet the band). Through it all, Manson kept finding new ways to piss people off, making him an easy culture wars target.
A moment of reckoning for the band came after the Columbine massacre in 1999. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of one of the deadliest school shootings in history, were fans of heavy metal aggressive music fans. Clad in black trench coats, they and their friends looked like Marilyn Manson fans. He was quickly made a scapegoat by everyone from the victims’ families to lawmakers, accused of having helped inspire the tragedy through his music.
Undeterred, Manson, and his fans, soldiered on, denouncing their actions, while simultaneously denying that neither his, nor any other artist’s music should be held responsible for the tragedy of Columbine or any other acts of violence.
Michael Moore interviewed the singer for Bowling for Columbine, his 2002 doc about the massacre and gun violence in general. In it, Moore asks Manson what he would have said to Harris and Klebold that might have stopped them from committing such a heinous crime. In what’s become of the film’s most famous scenes, the shock rocker responded: “I wouldn't say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say, and that's what no one did.”
With that one line, Manson not only managed to humanize two kids who committed mass murder but also gave a voice to thousands of his fans who felt similarly silenced or ignored.
Manson is unlikely to survive the accusations leveled against him this month. In the past, his adversaries tried to blame him for entrenched societal problems, like gun violence, for which there are no clear-cut answers or people who can be held responsible. The factors tying Manson to these offenses were always tenuous, if not downright preposterous.
This time, he is accused of doing something for which only he could be responsible, a chorus of voices alleging the same crime committed over and over again. And this time, Manson is unlikely to have his army of fans supporting his actions.
After all the years defending and elevating Manson as a valuable artist and cultural critic, we discover that he used his outsider status to mask the kind of disgusting behaviour many of us always believed he stood against. Instead of holding up Marilyn Manson as an important voice against a particular type of oppression, it turns out we’ve been helping some asshole named Brian Warner cover up a far more harmful abuse.
The high school harassment I experienced for liking Marilyn Manson was pretty limited. I grew up in a middle-class suburb of a big city and had pretty accepting parents. If anything, it’s something I think back on more as a weird cultural curiosity.
Yet for many, an artist like Manson was a lifeline to another world, one where looking, dressing or thinking differently was not only accepted but rewarded. But if I, a pretty casual fan, still thought of Manson as a valuable voice from my adolescent years, I can only imagine what he must have meant to these people, fans who stood by him through the roughest patches of his career.
Manson may yet escape any serious punishment for his alleged abuse; these kinds of charges are often hard to prove in a court of law, if perpetrators are charged at all, and the court of wider public opinion has proven fickle. But it’s hard to see his fans, the ones who gave him his power in the first place, ever forgiving this kind of betrayal.
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Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
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