I wish I had more time to articulate my point, but I'm just chiming in to say that, in my opinion,
Eat Me, Drink Me is by yards the best thing Manson released after
Mechanical Animals until
Pale Emperor (I know I'm even more in the minority here, but I feel
Holywood is twice as long as it needs to be and the stuff that should have been trimmed really hurts the LP's overall quality) and I might actually prefer
Eat Me to
Emperor, based solely on relative lyrical coherence when you compare the two. I'll never understand the hate
Eat Me gets. And Tim Skold's solos are some of the most fun guitar has ever been on a Manson record (some coming close to the transcendence of "Fundamentally Loathsome"). It seems weird to me that "Of course I hate
Eat Me, Drink Me more, but..." is one of the truly safe things to say here.
That said,
this album is terrible. This is the first time I feel like I'd be tempted to turn off a Manson album out of embarrassment if someone caught me listening to it—although "Pretty as a Swastika" was fucking
moronic in its attempted edginess then bullshit
ex-post facto Riefenstahl justification, the tune itself sounded badass so long as you ignored
that line and focused on the burning musicality and awesome, raw shrieks of "let me show you where it hurts." On
Upside Down, even his puns are now incoherent and lazy. That's like his stock and trade these days—and he's half-assing his turns of phrase? If Cocaine and Abel is the best you can muster, maybe delay the release a whole year instead of just six or so months. "I'm unstable. I'm not a show horse. I can't be bridled,
of course"? And if I had to guess, the vocal affectation put on "of course" is totally a nod to the theme song of
Mr. Ed. I am, unfortunately not kidding in this supposition.
After listening to this LP, I seriously wondered if the
really real reason for the delay was that no profit-seeking entity would put it out. Like someone at some stage of the process said, "Dude, improve it, or we won't cooperate with your release plans."
And man, am I SO not convinced by his roughneck, "I'll beat you up or maybe shoot you" shtick. I can think of musicians for whom it would work. Most have served prison time, most have (semi-)verified gangland ties. Most have histories that can be plausibly told or emended to prominently feature physical violence. Marilyn Manson is not one of these musicians. I remember when I was 16, we were both 120-pound weaklings, and I felt inspired by him for his ferocity which was
pointedly in spite of that fact. His...ironic braggadocio and self-destructive, reckless aggression was supposed to read as dangerous to two things: the established order and himself.
Something about seeing the very visible ribs of a scarred and starved long-haired dude in chaps and eyeliner screaming about how he'd destroy the world felt...familiar to those of us who
had that kind of rage, but were also trapped inside of lives and bodies that wouldn't allow us to "fight back" in the traditional sense. That juxtaposition was what made it interesting. His right-hand-man was a made up dude in a baby-doll dress. He was the scrawny, gender non-conforming wormboy with
no balls who would one day avenge his abuse and end the unjust world—that's what a lot of us felt like or wanted very much to feel like.
I know the seeds of this sort of more traditional violence have always been an element of the performance, but I think he forgot he's not actually a hard-ass. He's the kind of guy who gets sucker punched at a Denny's and then spends time miraculously
not getting the shit kicked out of him by an interviewer whom he ambushes with a capgun and flicks in the balls—his ass not kicked by virtue of his fame and that poor bastard's tenuous job security. I assume you still get fired for punching someone you're supposed to be interviewing, no matter how much he or she deserves it. Regardless, I don't think any amount of gun talk, invitations to wrestle, silver grills, or videos of you shooting pistols in the dangerously dumb John Woo side-tilted style will make us suddenly think: "Marilyn Manson is someone of whom I am and should be physically and martially afraid."
In "Snake-Eyes & Sissies," he took a position as an indictment of that position—think Trent Reznor and "God Given." Anyone think that if Manson sang "Sissies" now he would remember that breaking someone's teeth out with a wrench was ever supposed to be something other than cool as fuck? I somehow doubt it. These days, it's about how you look pretty when you cry" and how "I don't want to hit you" but I will...blah, blah. I've never been sure if "Pistol Whipped" was 1) A poorly executed romanticization of extreme BDSM meant to succeed on the back of the
Fifty Shades phenomenon; 2) A callback to the "Sissies"-era about the idiocy of romanticizing domestic abuse done deliberately poorly so we'd understand it's farcical; 3) A chaser for that "Running to the Edge of the World" video where he beat the shit out of a stand-in for his ex-girlfriend and here he's admitting that he gets off on hitting women, but also kind of wants to be punished for it. But I digress.
With that in mind and back to
Heaven: Bloody noses are like roses? I love the sound of shells hitting the ground? He claims recently not to understand why shitty rappers started loving him—he's an inch away from smacking his bitch and busting a cap in your ass. He's closer to 1993 gangsta rap than most 2017 rappers are. And again: I don't think he remembers that the whole point of him was satire. He was our culture's shit and we should be ashamed of what we've eaten? He put it in liner notes more than once and on a few tee shirts, too. Maybe it's all those bees in his nose—which actually IS a kind of cool line.
Not that artists aren't allowed to evolve or even change their minds completely. It's an important part of human existence and art itself. "Flip-flopping" is not inherently bad. But in the case of intellectual and performative satirists specifically, I think it's probably a sign of respect for one's audience (and decent business practice) to stop at some point and say "Remember when I used to represent the weakling who got a metal lunchbox and fought back the unthinking bully? When I pretended to be a shit-caked redneck asking 'Who said date rape isn't kind?' just so that you would justifiably respond with 'Well, it isn't, and you're a shit-caked monster for thinking otherwise?' Remember when I sang about how fucking nuts it was that people in this country love guns so much that they could serve in songs as stand-ins for lovers, babies, and even deities? Okay, well, now when I sing about weaklings, it's about kicking their ass for not standing up for themselves or for being "haters" standing up to me; if I'm singing about smacking women or anything like that, it's because I discovered I need to be the Alpha animal and want you to know that I'm the Dominant/Sadist in my sexual relationships which are all 1990s
eXXXtreme; and if I'm singing about guns it's because guns are powerful and cool and I have guns and I could kill you with guns and maybe I should. So now you understand—all the meanings shifted. Please sing along accordingly."
Would've been a nice memo to get. Rather than years of hints that Mr. Manson was maybe slowly infected by, uh, Ted Nugent's brain spores?
Or maybe he's really, really,
really into the long game. And in 2024 we'll get that long awaited acoustic LP,
For Twenty Years I Was Your Shit and We Were All Ashamed of What You'd Eaten, and the accompanying ethnological treatise in that finally clears everything up and proves he's been doing more than just chugging midmorning tumblers of vodka which, yes, I guess he does regularly now. Every time a new album comes out and I fork over my ten bucks (which I still will do upon actual release, despite deriding this thing), this is the thing I secretly hope for.
Bonus criticism: On first and second passes, the last two tracks make me think of a twelfth grader writing lyrics for Bon Jovi, who's just recently purchased a vocoder and decided to start a Marilyn Manson cover band. Take my hand, spin me around, this is heaven upside down indeed. Or whatever the hell the line is.
Funniest criticism I've heard (paraphrased): "In 'Revelation 12,' Manson forgets the number 11 exists at all and skips it completely every time he chants the main refrain of the song. There seems to be no significant reason for this other than...sheer forgetfulness?"
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Originally Posted by Prettybrokenspiral
