MARILYN MANSON — Antichrist Superstar (review)

MARILYN MANSON — Antichrist Superstar album cover Album · 1996 · Industrial Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
2/5 ·
Warthur
Even hardline defenders of Marilyn Manson's first concept album will probably admit that it sags in the middle - the teen angst woe-is-me ambiguous abuse songs really don't add much to it. It's at its best in the opening and closing portions, where Manson and his crew make a stab at presenting what is essentially a cynical 90s industrial rock take on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust - a parallel Manson would wryly acknowledge on the thematically related followup, Mechanical Animals, which would lean even harder into the Bowie parallels.

I used to be able to enjoy the album on the level of satire, a deliberate spoofing of the idea of rock stars or celebrities as messiahs. I thought that the final track, The Man That You Fear, was one of the most haunting songs about megalomania ever written, but my other favourite tracks were the catchier ones that admittedly do a good job of combining the most poppy and dance-able elements of alternative rock and industrial metal into a package which metal purists might sneer at but which certainly provided a goth club hit or two. (So that's The Beautiful People, maybe Irresponsible Hate Anthem, and... er, I guess that's it.)

Unfortunately, it's harder to interpret something as satire if the author is (or ends up becoming) the very thing he's describing. Whether you regard Manson as a manipulative abuser or just an egocentric asshole (I tend towards the former view, but even if you disbelieve all the accusations it's hard to dismiss the latter), the fact is that he's become exactly what he declared himself to be here, and that just isn't all that appealing.
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