It's a typically sunny spring day outside Reverend Marilyn Manson's downtown Toronto hotel room but it may as well be midnight. The singer, in town to talk up [[Marilyn Manson]]'s EP [[Smells Like Children]] and the new LP [[Antichrist Superstar (album)|Antichrist Superstar]], sits with the blinds closed, just a single lamp illuminating the otherwise darkened room.

Theatrical? Yes. Pretentious? Probably, but not inappropriate. Manson and his band mates - bassist [[Twiggy|Twiggy Ramirez]], new guitarist [[Zim Zum]], keyboardist [[Stephen Bier|Madonna Wayne Gacy]] and drummer [[Ginger Fish]] - have made a career out of being theatrical and outrageous, starting with those names: a collusion between American female icons and male serial killers. The Reverend, who was ordained into the Church of Satan by founder [[Anton LaVey]] himself, has torn up Mormon bibles on stage, toured with and befriended Nine Inch Nails' [[Trent Reznor]] and genuinely frightened parents across North America with his peculiar brand of spooky rock & roll excess.

Manson may have balance in his personal life but his music definitely leans more towards Satan than God. Produced by the band, Trent Reznor and long-time Skinny Puppy knob twiddler Dave 'Rave' Oglivie, Antichrist Superstar continues the heretical lyrical stance which got Marilyn Manson banned from Salt Lake City while touring with Nine Inch Nails. Besides the album's fundamentalist-baiting title, the first single '[[The Beautiful People]]' features Manson hissing the refrain: 'The beautiful people, the beautiful people/ It's all relative to the size of your steeple/ You can't see the forest from the trees/ You can't smell your own shit on your knees'. "The new record is something that has been written for quite some time," Manson says cryptically, "and it's actually something that - if we were to speak on our terms right here - won't be written for several years because it's a record that I've found has been written a long time from now. But I've managed to, by paying very careful attention to my dreams, obtain this album, and I find it to be something that has happened a long time from now.By I've managed to bring it into modern terms."

Bringing rock & roll into 'modern terms' is exactly what Marilyn Manson is all about. At every opportunity, Manson challenges America's behavioral standards and moral values, reveling in his outsider status. It's a sentiment expressed in [[Smells Like Children]]'s closing track, a cover of Patti Smith's '[[Rock 'n' Roll Nigger]]' in which Manson proclaims proudly: 'I am the all-American Antichrist/ ... I am your shit/ You should be ashamed of what you have eaten'. Become what you are and don't be ashamed,is Manson's message. "It's like the Superman theory that Nietzsche had," he says. "I think every man and woman is a star. It's just a matter of realizing it and becoming it. It's all a matter of willpower. You know, the world is just how you see it. If you want to have other people tell you how you see it, then you can. But if you want to look at it, then it's limitless what you can do. That's why I don't feel the need to ever have to be one person. I can be as many different people as I like. It's a matter of 'should you follow the rules that the world has set up for you?' or 'should you make your own?'. I choose to make my own."