The Devil's Music : Marilyn Manson, Satan and Me
* I’ve been into extreme metal and other forms of subversive self-expression for over twenty years. I wasn’t born like that. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Every month I will tell you the story of how and why I began waging war to my eardrum. This is how I got into the Devil’s Music. *
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I was in high school when nu metal was a thing. Not just a fleeting trend, but a chart domineering force that swept over the planet. Frosty tips, self-loathing and downtuned guitars were the official sound of our teenage alienation, prompting older punk rock kids to roll their eyes and scoff at us. Primary spokespeople for my generations were bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. Slipknot would technically belong on this list too, but their success came a little later. They are also the only band in this list that is still unironically successful twenty years later.
Now, I’ve enjoyed the bands I’ve named above to various degrees. Limp Bizkit was by far my favorite. Even today, I can earnestly appreciate songs like Counterfeit or Re-Arranged. But I never owned any of their albums. I never owned any of the aforementioned bands’ albums in high school. I’d like to tell you it’s some kind of precarious musical integrity thing, but it wasn’t. Where I come from, heavy metal was a social activity and the purpose of it was to find the most extreme possible music and brag to your friends that your new favorite band was manlier than theirs.
Marilyn Manson was clearly not the most extreme artist I discovered in high school. A band like Deicide was far more intense, musically and symbolically, but I never really appreciated them. I never related to what they did in the way I related to Manson. Plus, he was technically the most extreme artist that could be labeled nu metal. It’s not exactly what he did. He was always more of an industrial rock act, but back then if you played loud music and attracted rebellious teenage audience, you were a nu metal act in collective consciousness.
The legacy of Marilyn Manson in my extreme metal journey isn’t really tied to his music, though. It’s more about what he represented. Marilyn Manson introduced the idea of Satanism in my life. The philosophical cornerstone of heavy metal ideology. Unlike bands like Deicide who literally worshipped Satan, Manson was embodying the symbolic meaning of the dark lord: rebellion. He would deliberately embrace what society feared. The twisted and the forbidden. He would not just literally, but also ideologically rebel by introducing new, subversive ideas in popular culture.
That initially scared the shit out of my thirteen years old self. I didn’t understand what Marilyn Manson was doing on an intellectual level, but it resonated with me viscerally. It would take years and at least three albums before I would assimilate it. The complete rejection of traditional, Judeo-Christian values. Before Manson, I didn’t understand how Christian the very foundation of our society is: the idea of being a good person, of having duties to perform and penance to pay whenever you diverge from the flock. He shed light on this by goading society into an ideological fight.
Satan is so important to heavy metal because it is an icon of rebellion and a beacon for the rejection of traditional values. His powers are spiritual.
From age thirteen on, my relationship to Marilyn Manson’s music and artistic legacy would evolve like fine wine. He would’ve probably remained pop culture’s boogeyman for a lot longer if the internet and all the daily horror it hosts didn’t swallow him whole. By the release of Holy Wood, the world he so energetically rebelled against was bored of his act because there was worse to be found on Ogrish.com. Things that were worse and, for lack of a better term, real. Today, Manson is trying hard to find a target for his conceptual rage, but rage has stopped being cool too.
But Marilyn Manson remains important. Both culturally and in my personal journey towards extreme music. by exposing the framework of normalcy with his philosophy, aesthetic and provocation. He’s made the world a slightly better place and shed a guiding light on my life. Does that make me a Satanist?
