Interview:1996/08 Vintage Interview: Marilyn Manson from 1996

Vintage Interview: Marilyn Manson from 1996
Interview with Marilyn Manson
Date	August, 1996 published on March 23, 2016
Source	paulsemel.com
Interviewer	Paul Semel

In my career, I’ve interviewed a lot of interesting musicians and actors. But since many of the magazines and websites that originally published those stories aren’t around anymore, I’ve decided to pull some of the more interesting interviews out of my archive.

The following interview with Marilyn Manson took place in August of 1996 at a house he had rented in New Orleans while recording Antichrist Superstar. Parts of the interview were used in a piece about him I wrote for the music magazine huH.

Are you evil?

With anything that I do, I always try to create my own heaven and hell. To me, the definition of good and evil is relative to each person; good is really what you like and evil is what you don’t like. So to people out there who don’t like or misunderstand or are afraid of what I do, they’re going to consider me evil. But I don’t consider what I do to be evil, for my purposes. I don’t set out to do wrong, I set out to do what’s right for me.

I think in every person’s nature, good and evil is the balance that makes a person. It’s often that people are afraid to accept that and experience both sides. That’s when you really run into problems with society because it’s the self-denial and the hypocrisy that weakens everything. If people would just accept the Marilyn, accept the Manson, and see how the two things work together they’d just be happier. But when people hear “Marilyn Manson,” they don’t want to talk about Marilyn Monroe, they want to talk about Charles Manson. It’s always been a science project for me to see how people react, what motivates people, what their fears are, and that continues to inspire me to write.

Are you a bad person?

I believe that the people that I love and that I care for and consider friends I would do anything. Except, I don’t pass out good will openly to anybody, I don’t abide by the Christian value of “Love Thy Neighbor” because I think that waters down the value of love. If you love everybody, it really has no meaning. I find that the things that I care strongly about and would do anything for them, and likewise for the things I despise, I really don’t do anything against them.

As for if I’m a good person or a bad person, I think it’s going to be up to how an individual person views me, but I’m a good friend and I’m very loyal. I’m fair, I’m a very fair person.

Is man good or evil?

It’s always going to be a combination of the two. People have the potential to be good. But man as an animal is, by nature, evil because — if you want to subscribe to the Christian mythology of it all — it’s the whole Garden Of Eden, man chose the wrong path. It’s part of being imperfect, part of being flawed, and that’s what makes you a human being.

So yeah, you can say people are innately bad or innately good, but you can’t look at that as derogatory because that’s what makes you a human. As a person, you shouldn’t be ashamed of the way you feel, you should be able to accept things like hatred and greed and lust because they’re part of your personality.

Do these things come up in the new album?

Absolutely. One of the underlying themes is the struggle between trying to realize that, my own battle with the question, and the idea of…I got really fascinated by the story of Lucifer and the fallen angel and the idea of being kicked out of Heaven for rebelling against God. And I sort of considered the old saying, “History is written by the winners.” What makes Lucifer such a bad guy? Maybe its just that the people who wrote the story decided that he was going to be the bad guy. I can relate more to his characteristics than to that of the opposing team. That’s definitely something that was constantly considered throughout the making of the album, and even going back and listening to it now.

I don’t know anything about it myself, but a friend who’s familiar with it explained that Satanism isn’t worshiping the devil, worshiping the dark side, it’s more about individualism.

It’s a metaphor, really. I don’t want people to misconceive me as a spokesperson for the Church Of Satan. I consider it one of many qualifications, like being a Boy Scout or in 4H.

Were you a Boy Scout?

[sheepishly] Uh, I didn’t do very good at that. I didn’t get any of those badges.

The writings of Anton LaVey [The Satanic Bible and its companion The Satanic Rituals] led me to come out of my shell and inspired me in many ways. So it was flattery for him to ask, “Do you want to be a part of the organization?” But it’s not a title that I necessarily exercise. I appreciate it and respect it, but I’m my own person, and I don’t subscribe to any one ideal, which is why I don’t want to limit myself to just the Church Of Satan. That’s just a balance for where I find other inspiration, anything from Hebrew cabalism to Dr. Seuss. It’s all input for me.

I’ve heard all sorts of propaganda, and a lot of it interests me. I’m very into dreams, and deja vus, and aliens and angels being one and the same, and is…am I a man considering myself an angel, or an angel that’s fooled into thinking himself a man?

What were you like as a kid, say five or six?

I don’t remember exactly. I went to a private Christian school; everyone’s heard that story before. I was a scared kid a lot of times. I was always afraid to go to sleep without the lights on, so I developed a habit of sleeping with the TV on. And I still do. It’s not out of being afraid, it’s a habit.

Were you picked on?

I was always a little skinny kid that nobody really liked, so I was always just doing my own thing. I was really into fantasy and imagination. I remember when I was twelve, I started playing Dungeons & Dragons. Escapism was what it was about for me, because I didn’t really like and wasn’t the person that I wanted to be in the real world, so I was the person I wanted to be in my own head. I mean, it wasn’t miserable, but it was just weird.

Your given name is Brian Warner. Is there a difference between Brian and Marilyn?

Marilyn Manson, if at first was some sort of creation for me to escape what I didn’t want to be any more, it is something that has consumed me and I find no escape from. That’s not to say I don’t like that, but it’s something that…the idea of on-stage and off-stage, for me, Marilyn Manson itself has two sides to it. So for me, it’s always Marilyn Manson, but within in that are many personalities. Also, making this album, I went through a lot of transformations and this other personality of Antichrist Superstar has also even come into my life. It’s kind of this name I gave for less tolerant, nihilistic element of my personality.

I think it’s much more exciting and enjoyable to live your life as more than one thing. If you want to narrow it down and label it into little categories it becomes boring. If Marilyn Manson is a show, then everything in my life is a show because it’s all the time for me and that’s the way I like it.

So there’s no difference?

There’s a time and a place for everything, and that’s the different sides of Marilyn Manson itself. I guess you could say that what we is, what we are — excuse me — is for real, but what’s real? People ask me, “Is that your real hair color?” Everything is as real as you want it to be in my world. Something I believe is true may be considered a lie by someone else; that’s part of the excitement, the question of, “What is real?” It’s sincere, if you want to put it in those terms.

Six years ago, when Marilyn Manson came out, it was on several different levels. It was symbolic to kind of shed the skin of my past — people refer to your given name as your Christian name — so there’s symbolism there, and it was also the idea that show business is so fake that I wanted to pick a name that was as fake as it could be so it would realer than anything else because it acknowledges itself as being fake. Marilyn Monroe itself was a fake name, and Charles Manson was not his born name either, so I thought that was an exciting irony for me. And, of course, the other reasons for Marilyn Manson being the dichotomy, the extreme positive and negative.

How long have you been living in New Orleans?

It’s almost five months now, and we actually finished the album today. Finally. I plan on leaving immediately and I don’t know where I’ll place myself. Except on tour.

Part of coming here was, if I was to pick any place in America that was Earth’s equivalent of Hell, it would be New Orleans, because I think it’s a place where people come to die. There’s a saying here in New Orleans, “There’s two things here: bars and graveyards.” And it’s absolutely true, this is a very miserable town. But at the same time you can use that to your advantage. You can see how worthwhile life is by being so near the ugliness of it all. And, luckily, that’s what I managed to do.

It’s a real dark town, and that’s not to try and play up any sort of hype for New Orleans, it’s just a really ugly place. It’s something you don’t see when you’re just here for a day or two, but when you’re here for months it really works at you.

You mentioned bars and graveyards, but there’s two other things in New Orleans: blues and voodoo. Any of that in new album?

Maybe I fed off of what a lot of blues artists felt by living in New Orleans, that depression and that reason for the blues. But actually listening to the blues never really came into play for me. I do like a lot of it here and there sporadically, but it’s not one of my main influences.

The voodoo element down here is interesting, though. You can get the tourist version by going to the Quarter, but you can really talk to people who’ve been down here for years. A friend of mine, who was a professor at Tulane College, he was really well-versed in all of the different mythologies, I spent a lot of time learning things from him.

Making our album, it was a bit of experimentation. I wanted to…being really into my dreams and tap into my subconscious that you normally can’t get at by just sitting around and thinking. We went through a lot of experiments that led to, probably, the disintegration of different elements of our camp, our guitar player leaving, things like that. We experimented in pain, experimented in narcotics, Hebrew cabalism, numerology has become very important on the new album. When you look at it very carefully, people can read into a lot of the numbers and the symbols.

What we did in the end, and I think quite successfully, is create a musical ritual that would bring about The Apocalypse. But the thing is, people look at The Apocalypse as the world being destroyed, but I look at it on a different level. For me, the idea of Antichrist is an unspoken knowledge that every person has, and it’s just the denial of God and the acceptance of yourself as a powerful entity that can make their own decisions. It’s not so much one person with a 666 on their head who’s going to burn down the world. So when I say “The Apocalypse,” I think every time people listen to this new album, maybe that’s an Armageddon of the subconscious, maybe its people dying in their mind, God being destroyed in their head and them becoming themselves and going through the same transformation I did, where you are a worm and you become something that’s much stronger. I don’t care if something’s good or bad or if it’s Christian or anti-Christian; I want something that’s strong, something that believes in itself.

So…if this album takes off, it might destroy society as we know it?

I watched something the other day on VH1, it was like the early days of MTV and people were talking about music and it’s effect on society, and I watched artist after artist say, “I don’t think music can change anything, it’s entertainment.” But I completely disagree. I think, you write a song, and people are singing it, and the things that people hum along to have some resonance.

But music cannot make someone do something against their nature

I totally agree with you. Let me rephrase what I was saying. The most that I can do is make someone want something to happen in society. I can’t make them do something, I can’t make them find the truth. Maybe I can make them want the truth. If you look back throughout history, it’s been art and music that’s actually made the changes. Now, it hasn’t done it itself, you’re not going to see a physical change. People aren’t going to buy Antichrist Superstar and the next day burn down churches, that’s not the way it’s going to happen. It’s just a change of heart.

But how would you feel if someone did burn a church in your name?

Part of what I say is about being an individual. I want you to be yourself, I don’t want you to be like me. If they’re being themselves, they’re being like me.

People are going to do what they want to do, people are going to interpret things how they want. But part of what I try and say in everything is to be responsible individual. If you want to be your own god and you want to be yourself, then you have to take responsibility for all your actions. That’s why I’m willing to go to jail when I break the law. I’m not going to sit there and fight and say, “No, I’m an artist; I deserve to do what I want.” It’s against the law and you have to deal with that, and people can’t be ignorant of that.

And in terms of people killing themselves, it is about a celebration of life, living life to its fullest because you may not be around the next day to do so. I believe in strong thing, and taking the easy way out isn’t a strong thing to do. If you don’t like the world you should change it, you shouldn’t give up and split.

Seems like in a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a Marilyn Manson?

In the world that I envision, Marilyn Manson isn’t necessary. However, that’s not the world we live in.

With all the seriousness and all of the dark outlook and the grim outlook for the future, I do enjoy doing what I do, and I do enjoy who I am, so in no way am I ever complaining about having to accept this role. In the end, it is music, and it is for people’s entertainment, and it is to be enjoyed, and it is to inspire people to do their own thing and be creative in their own way. If someone listens to our music and it makes them creative, that’s makes me happier than anything.

If the world was perfect, would you be a baseball player or stock broker or something like that?

No, I’m sure I would still enjoy this because I enjoy writing songs and I enjoy making people happy, or making people fulfilled, giving people what I always wanted when I was a kid.

Do you remember the first time you felt accepted?

I don’t think I’ve gotten to that point because it’s always had to be on my own terms. The only time I feel like I’m a part of something that makes me comfortable it’s something that I’ve created for myself. I don’t look at that as necessarily a bad thing, I look at it as, “Why bother trying to fit in when you can make your own?”

But going back to the “perfect world” and Marilyn Manson and that whole thing, Marilyn Manson had started as a reaction, but I think it’s now finishing as a solution. I think Antichrist Superstar is an answer to questions I posed early on.

So then where do you go from here?

That’s really going to be up to the world: how they accept the album, how much they take it to heart, how much they apply it to their own lives.

It’s almost like you’re saying that everything has been leading up to this album, it’s the magnum opus.

I feel that way on different levels, but that’s not to say there isn’t something after this. For me, going back to the idea of everything being a science project, it’s real relative to how the world interprets this. I consider the audience and the music to feed off each other, and what comes of each is accordant to what the other is doing.

Going into this album, the stuff that inspired me the most: David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, [Pink Floyd’s] The Wall, Funhouse]' by The Stooges, and Billion Dollar Babies by Alice Cooper. Those were some of my favorite albums as a kid, and all had stories that held them together, and one day I wanted to place my album alongside them.