After a lifetime of being an outsider, Marilyn Manson, born Brian Warner, is coming to terms with his past. In a frank and soul-searching interview, he talks to Carole Cadwalladr about the loss of his mother, growing up angry – and why he’s ready for fatherhood
It turns out Manson’s lyrics about killing, about killing strangers, are true in a literal way that even he hadn’t quite realised. His father did kill strangers. And Manson, and his mother, lived with the aftermath.
“I think that he was very, very good at what he did. In the same way as the character that Martin Sheen plays in Apocalypse Now. I think my father was selected to do a job. He entered the air force at 17 and you just don’t know what your life is going to be at that age. He never talked to me about it. He still hasn’t really spoken of it. I think it was after my mother’s passing that he felt it was a time where it was necessary to tell me: ‘This is who I really am.’ And I think he was selected for being good at what he did – and that was killing people.”
When you realise that he spent the first 18 years of his life in a household dominated by the after-effects of violence, Marilyn Manson and his music, his obsessions, his sense of alienation, his fascination with killing, his insistence on living outside the strictures of mainstream American society, suddenly makes much more sense. And if it’s a light-bulb moment for me understanding who he is and where’s he come from, it also seems to have been for him.
His father had told him not to write. And he went to journalism college anyway. “The first article I ever did,” he recalls, “was about Marilyn Manson, which I wrote as myself as Brian Warner, and that was in part why I had to have a pseudonym, a stage name. I was put in a situation where I was suddenly stuck with… where I had created a Frankenstein’s monster. There was Marilyn Manson, but there was no music yet. I created a fake world maybe because I didn’t like the one I was living in. But that’s what made me make music. I had to fill in the gaps I’d created.”
It seems to me, that this particular interview does tie in to his cryptic interview from September 2017; I would say that the latter was part of a bigger decision by Brian, to make peace with his past an 'exorcise some demons', so to speak...
I have also listened to several songs on Heaven Upside Down and the lyrics seem to firmly bolster my theory that Brian was dropping hints in the 2017 interview, hence his seemingly-suspicious injuries of late.
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Truthseeker3000 ago
He's still pretty vague. I think there was some kind of SRA in his family growing up. If his father never told him about the killing growing up while he was young how would he know about all that at that age. And killing who and for what. If the military was involved then even more so that SRA was done on this nutjob.
Herbvendor ago
That would be an incorrect assumption, there was no SRA in his family or his life. I read his autobiography and he details his early life quite well. He was molested by a neighbor when he was young several times. That same neighbor poisoned his dog, which is why he wears his contact lenses in memory of his husky his abuser killed. .
Also had a hard time in Christian school growing up, paranoid about the end times and hellfire and brimstone, like most children are around those sorts of things.
he also walked in on his grandfather mid climax when he was dressed in drag and saw all his old smut mags and sex toys.
I remember reading about something him walking through the woods with a friends and seeing Satanic altar places or something like that, but was never participating or so he said. Befriended Anton Lavey and was made an honorary Rev of Church of Satan, but never really detailed any Satanic rituals in his auto-bio. Did some freaky shit with groupies backstage though
argosciv ago
Thanks for the clarification there, I was gonna see if I could find more on the subject, but, you seem to have it covered.
pixiesbitch ago
I suggest doing your own research