He's hated by a lot of liberal groups, but he doesn't really ever talk about religion and that's why there's such a big difference - his success was much more immediate. Who does he think the Christian right hate more, him or Eminem? "Um, I think me.
And yet he grew up in an atmosphere of intense anxiety, linked, he thinks, to religious hypocrisy. His rebellion is not excused by poverty or abuse and although his father came back from Vietnam with post-traumatic stress disorder, they were ostensibly a happy family. "People only hate what they see in themselves," he says, which, in his case, is a sickness at the heart of the nuclear family. Whatever one thinks of his music, Manson's place in American culture is useful in exposing the extent to which it is still possible to be punished for one's imagination. Manson identifies with the way in which both men were persecuted, although his own situation, in which he has invited persecution as proof of the power of his art, is hardly commensurate. His hero is Oscar Wilde, for "his life, his writing, everything that happened to him," and to a lesser extent, the Marquis de Sade, "despicable though he might have been". I think I was probably drawn to a lot of European music and art." "As a kid I just felt like an outsider," says Manson, and at least has the grace to look embarrassed by the cliche. He grew up in Canton, Ohio, the son of a Vietnam veteran and a housewife, which he says had him hating life from early on. The Manson image, more suspiciously viewed in the US where the goth look never took off among teens, was created as a reaction to the oppressiveness of first Christian school, then the wider conservatism of the American midwest. But during the course of an hour's interview, the most extravagant departure Manson makes from blankness is a shallow smirk, in response to the question, "Do you vote?" (Manson: "No." Me: "Why not?" Manson, smirking, "Because I don't have a driver's licence.") He is polite but diffident, balancing one huge-booted foot on the other and compulsively rearranging his tie. A man who describes himself as "a death's head on a mop-stick" and answers his critics with the lyric, "I want to hang all your cattle," can't ever be accused of taking himself too seriously. The panda facepaint, the frogspawn contact lenses and the dull, rasping voice might be whimsically intended, but their effect is one of deep and tedious mirthlessness, the sort of pained pretension you see in teen goths stalking round Camden on a Saturday. It is an admirable effort, inspired by his early years as a sickly and marginalised child, but it carries with it certain problems of style over content. "It's my job to be the Pierrot," he says, "the clown, in the theatrical sense." And he thinks of himself as a cabaret MC, a Joel Grey figure peddling escapism in times of, if not fascism, then ultra-conservatism. In this he has been aided by the idiocy of America's Christian right, to whom the sight of him capering about on stage in Mickey Mouse ears and a bondage mask is not unsubtle burlesque, but heresy.Īlthough Manson takes the fashionable view that there is no such thing as being misunderstood, since "the person who thinks I worship the devil and kill animals is just as important as someone who makes an interpretation that's closer to what I intended," he has, none the less, profited from being so condemned. Manson, whose stage name (he was born nerdy old Brian Warner) satirises the uncritical nature of celebrity by marrying Charles Manson with Marilyn Monroe, has made a career, literally, out of being misunderstood. It is similar to the effect he gets by posing - cavorting, I suppose - in front of the chintzy mentality of small-town America. Manson stands out against the chintz furnishings of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, Knightsbridge, which one senses he is grateful to for amplifying the wackiness of his image.
But we're a little bit different, he and I."
"It felt like he was trying to outdo me," he says drily. So it is with some amusement - if that isn't too animated a state to describe his wintry half-smile - that the 34-year-old rock star considers Michael Jackson's arrest last month for child molestation. With his Halloween mask and androgynous, crone-like appearance, Manson was regarded by sections of the media as a child-snatcher and his music blamed for contributing to the Columbine high-school massacre. I n 1995, Marilyn Manson released an album called Smells Like Children, which was received, as were his two previous and nine subsequent albums, not entirely in the spirit in which it was intended.
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