Back to School
Well, needless to say, the wonderful world of rock and roll has been delivering the goods with that special "back-to-school" marketing fervor that you can tag to just about every September annually, but this year's bounty seems a pretty exciting crop on a lot of different levels. "Back-to-school" is a phrase that brings to mind images of fresh young faces, minds untainted and eager to learn, like virgin tablets of fresh clean paper, never cracked open yet ready to be filled with valuable lessons, information they will carry and use for the rest of their lives, their full, productive, family values-guided god-fearing patriotic lives. That's why it thrills me to no end that one of the biggest selling rock and roll releases of the season is the latest from Marilyn Manson, Mechanical Animals. Selling 223,000 units in the first week of it's release, the band's fourth full length LP hit the number one spot easily and showed signs of possibly equaling the record-breaking sales figures set by the Beastie Boys Hello Nasty in it's first few weeks of release. Why does this please me? It's pretty simple. In the beginning, rock and roll was controversial and forbidden, a musical style lifted from traditional R&B based Afro-American roots in the pre-civil rights era 50's. For teenagers of that era, to embrace that sensational style was equivalent to walking hand in hand with The Beast. It was the devil's music, the foghorn guide through the mist of adolescence charting a course straight into the dark world of juvenile delinquency. To embrace it was an act of cultural rebellion, and arguably an artistic pre-cursor to the entire civil rights movement. It prompted a gigantic step forward, it induced change. Bearing that in mind, controversy is a quality that I look for in rock and roll, something that in it's purest form must be inherent. That's why I like Marilyn Manson. As a band they are providing packaged rebellion for the youth of the world. Granted, I don't anticipate an impact as great or monumental as it had in the 50's but at least it is there, in simple straightforward terms easily understood.
While Mechanical Animals isn't nearly as complex and hard-hitting as it's predecessor Anti-christ Superstar, an album of excessively dark forces and other-worldly visions, inspecting organized religion with an apocalyptic blasphemous bent, it does stick hard and fast to some basic fundamental themes of modern teen rebellion, and they are, repeat after me, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Very simple this time around, no alternative worlds or systems of belief created on this outing. Manson sticks to the here and now with familiar content easily understood by his fan base and more. This ball was cleverly set into motion with the releases of the first single from the album entitled "The Dope Show," it's lyrical content predictably agit and controversial, as well as the advertising campaign, those ever-present alien-like androgynous images of Manson with budding breasts and barbie-doll genitalia plastered everywhere, prompting a ban of the record from being sold in Walmart, K-mart and Target. The video for the song features the alien androgyne Manson wandering through a miasma of Hollywood/rock and roll superstardom scenes, all limos, IV bottles dripping colored liquid, fashion photoshoots, crowd control (Cops in pink polyester uniforms with batons and helmets, dancing dirty and even open-mouth kissing!), therapy, symbolic self-destruction (Manson smashing a room full of his own mannequin likeness) and red glittering platforms. It's visually stunning, in short everything a rock video should have, and adequately controversial, so much so that when I first saw it, MTV (for god knows what reason) deleted a word from the lyrics, that word was "queers", from the line, "Cops and queers to swim you have to swallow." Can you figure that one out? They show two male cops kissing but won't allow the word queer?
All of these elements predictably spelled out HIT in big letters, too big to be ignored by just about anyone soaking up any forms of media on the planet. Whether parents like it or not, the kids have a new flamboyant, androgynous, anti-Christian, dirty-mouthed, drug-addled, sexually morose and fiendish, parental advisory stamped, buttock-exposing, make-up wearing, girly-man psycho-freak Rock and Roll superstar. Mothers, hide your make-up and support garments, Fathers participate more with your teen son. It's just like when David Bowie released Diamond Dogs in 1974. Odd isn't it. Both in elements of image as well as musical hints and even lyrical similarities and concepts, Mechanical Animals is replete with almost blatant Bowie-isms, no apologies or denials. Manson has cited in interview the influence of Glam-rock era on his current work.
"The Dope Show," inspite of it's controversial lyrics and blatant drug references propelling it into our consciousness, like a giant walking syringe playing a flute and leading the children of the world into the hopeless abyss of drug addiction while dancing up the billboard hot 100 charts, it really flies on the strength of a terrific and catchy musical hook. It immediately gets your toes tapping and soon has you singing along with it's familiar sounding verse-chorus-verse structure. As a pop music moment, it's a real gem. Can't you just see all the havoc it will wreak upon junior high schools across the nation? From the smoking cage on campus, 13 and 14 year olds with suburban Goth smudge painted faces screaming in unison, "We're all stars now, in the dope show," or "There's lots of pretty pretty ones/ that want to get you high." It will be parents and teachers worst nightmare. It's a good thing.
The rest of the songs on the record seemed a bit light to me musically, more pop oriented, nothing as tense and hard-hitting as the harsh mindcurdling metal mayhem of Antichrist Superstar's best moments, and initially this stylistic change kind of turned me off, not being ready for or wanting a kinder gentler Marilyn Manson. Then I started absorbing the lyrical content of these songs more carefully, and this time around, the world presented by Mechanical Animals is frighteningly familiar and bleak, an inspection of the last and only things that make the human being feel vaguely human. Again Bowie comes to mind, specifically Diamond Dogs, only this vision, this world doesn't seem so fictionalized and futuristic--it seems like now, and conceptually that is very hard-hitting. While the music doesn't hit you like a blow to the gut, a monument of noise and power(i.e. "The Beautiful People"), the words are pretty fucking devastating and dark. Drugs are one of the more prevalent and recurring points of reference throughout the LP, from the first single, to "I Don't Like The Drugs (But The Drugs Like Me)" and it's Huxley-esque Soma homage, "You and I are underdosed and we're ready to fall/ Raised to be stupid, taught to be nothing at all" to the refrain in "Coma White," of "A pill to make you numb/ A pill to make you dumb/ A pill to make you anybody else/ But all the drugs in this world/ Won't save her from herself." In the albums closing piece, "Untitled", the main character of this achingly described world apes Bowie again and floats off into space saying,"We Were Hardworn Automatic And As Hollow As The "O" In God/ I Reattached My Emotions Cellular And Narcotic", equating emotions with a drugged state, which is actually a world away from the usual bad rap given to a fact of life that immediately connotes the easy evil--the clear wrong-the succubus of society. Interesting.
The entire record basically and quite graphically depicts a world where all people are surely headed toward a certain state of dehumanization, which is frankly not a new theme in the genre of rock and roll, film, literature, or anything really. Some of the songs have a genuine melancholy feeling, a human cry of anguish over the loss of emotion, the loss of love, while others herald it in a snide relentless way. One of those latter moments is the song "User Friendly" which is probably my favorite moment on the album for it's corrosive filthiness and utter lack of subtlety. The chorus slams it right up in your face with the blunt sentiment or void of sentiment lines, "I'm not in love, but I'm gonna fuck you/ 'til somebody better comes along." I played that cut to a bar full of people and when it was over someone screamed "Nice song!" Indeed. Like I said, it's all been done before, this familiar theme, so how important can it really be in the grand scheme of things? That could be narrowed down to the fact that it's the current number one selling record and it's inherent controversial rebellious rock and roll element is fully intact. So, like Christmas and Halloween and Disneyland, this one is for the children.
