To become a wraith, he was slathered in latex and silver paint. He told me that Manson was supposed to have had a sequence of dog teats on his chest, but they were deemed too weird to be erotic and switched for that lone pair of breasts. Manson and his partner in crime, photographer Joseph Cultice, wanted the album’s cover to be a shocking end-of-the-century sequel to the sleeve for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974), in which Ziggy Stardust appears as an airbrushed half-man, half-dog beast, complete with ambiguous werewolf genitalia. In the Hollywood Hills, Mechanical Animals was coming to life, a dystopian rock opera about an alien superstar who grows sick of success and drifts into chemically induced oblivion. He was Florida swamplands gothic, and this was dark magic. Manson told stories about an adolescence colored by bad acid trips, trailer park deviants, and dead dogs (RIP, Aleusha). There were teenage fans who carved his name into their flesh, the spidery letters mimicking the font from Edward Gorey books. There was a cute monochrome snap of pubescent “Brian” dressed up as the Catman from Kiss. I snuck into a long-since-demolished Tower Records outlet in the shopping complex near my house and gawped at the photos in Manson’s schlock autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell (1998). Manson wasn’t my introduction to the stranger things of the imagination-monsters, androgyny, transformation-but he brought them all together in one song-and-dance man. (Tim Burton invented my young brain.) Like the Beast who breaks Beauty’s heart, he was proof that somebody could be beautiful and freakish at once, drawing awesome power from the paradox. Manson was a rock version of the heroes who stalked through my childhood dreams promising wicked fun, like Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) or Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman (1989). Maybe it was a warning, or maybe that’s what my school wanted me to think. My body, which was well trained at making me feel like a lonesome gargoyle (wonky eyes, flat feet, warped brain) was getting even odder. The encounter with Mechanical Animals was the big one before puberty hit. Living in the nowhere land of English suburbia, who could resist something like that? In a 2012 interview, Grimes pointed out the father-son likeness between them: Manson “ the Michael Jackson thing, where you live your art, except it was scary as shit.” Twenty years later, he seems like the product of some transdimensional romance, equal parts rave Nosferatu, Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, and undead Grace Jones. His body was a sexy and threatening sculpture his flesh glowed Michael Jackson white. I had only a cartoon understanding of the anatomical differences between “boy” and “girl”-was a vulva a wizard thing?-and Manson melted them under fluorescent lights on a Saturday morning. All the bats in my stomach came fluttering into delighted life. Suddenly there he was, throwing my nine-year-old self a demonic stare, this zonked ghoul with prosthetic breasts and hair dyed hellfire red. I don’t know when this happened, but presumably it was in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, when Manson was at his most infamous thanks to right wing goons who deemed him responsible for the event. In 1999, just after the English ban on the movie ended, I saw part of The Exorcist and spent the next year haunted by a loopy carousel of Linda Blair puking green slime.Īt some fuzzy point, Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals came into my treehouse of horror. I left a secret piece of cake for the monster under my bed. I experimented with a furry Gizmo doll, turning the star of Gremlins inside out to reveal his evil twin. I tried to summon the devil from Legend on a Halloween night. Certain memories still have the lurid and cozy glow of a decaying VHS tape.
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