MARILYN MANSON RETROSPECTIVE, DAY 5: THE GOLDEN AGE OF GROTESQUE

Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 9:24am by Axl Rosenberg

For the next five days, leading up the release of Marilyn Manson’s new album, Eat Me, Drink Me, on June 5, we’ll be looking back at Manson’s catalogue (LPs only – no EPs, live albums, or remix collections), closely examining the work of one of metal’s most important figures. We’ll conclude with our official review of Eat Me, Drink Me, but today, we continue with Manson’s fifth album, The Golden Age of Grotesque.

THE LINE-UP: Marilyn Manson (vocals), John 5 (guitars), Tim Skold (bass), Madonna Wayne Gacy (synths), Ginger Fish (drums)

PRODUCED BY: Marilyn Manson and Tim Skold

MEMBER WHO HELPED WRITE THE ALBUM BUT ISN’T ACTUALLY ON IT: None. The whole album was written by Manson, Skold, and John 5, with a little help from Gacy.

OTHER NOTABLE CONTRIBUTORS: None, aside from some guest background vocalists you’ve probably never heard of and would never notice are there anyway.

BEST SONG: “Vodevil”

CREEPIEST LYRIC: None of the lyrics here are all that creepy, but I always get a chuckle from the line “I’ve got an F, and a C, and I’ve got a K, too/ And the only thing that’s missing is a bitch like U.” (“(s)AINT”)

Sometime after Holy Wood, Manson did a cover of Soft Cell’s 80’s pop megahit, “Tainted Love,” for the soundtrack to the tremendously unfunny “comedy” known as Not Another Teen Movie. While the song retained the same line-up that had been with Manson since the Mechanical Animals tour in ‘98, it introduced a new element into The Spooky Kids’ world: producer Tim Skold. Skold was best known as the lead singer of hair band Shotgun Messiah, but he’d found a second life as a member of industrail groups KMFDM and, subsequently, MDFMK.

Little did anyone know, “Tainted Love” – and its video, a hip-hop house party parody that featured a guest appearance by Slipknot’s Joey Jordison – would serve as the swan song of Twiggy Ramirez, who by this point was Manson’s oldest and most important collaborator, writer or co-writer of all his biggest hits.

“Tainted Love”
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Ramirez quitting Manson struck most fans – well, me, anyways – as making the prospects of Manson ever making another decent album as, well, pretty gloomy. The announcement that Skold would be stepping in for Ramirez full time wasn’t really all that encouraging, given some of his past, er… endeavors.

Turns out no one had any reason to worry: The Golden Age of Grotesque was a return to form for Manson, an album almost – ALMOST – as good as Mechanical Animals. And as if to let us know that he had re-entered the building, Manson titled the lead track from his new offering “This is the New Shit.”

“This is the New Shit”

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This is easily Manson’s most accessible album, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it comes from a mixture good, concise pop metal songwriting and an artistic through-line that, for once, actually makes some sense: undoubtedly inspired by his new soon-to-be wife, burlesque mistress Dita Von Teese, Manson chose, for his latest super-freak transformation, to emulate the Weimar Republic. This was the government that took control of Germany by revolution a decade and a half before the Nazis took over and fucked things up for everybody – including artists like Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Fritz Lang, Kurt Weill, and Heinrich and Thomas Mann, all of whom thrived in the Weimar.

The connection between Manson and these artists is pretty clear, if perhaps a tad self-important and self-pitying: under the Bush regime, Manson saw a puritanical society springing up around him – one that would not allow artists such as himself to exist. That the album was released just months after Bush’s invasion of Iraq only made its content feel more relevant and immediate than ever.

But tapping into Weimar culture also allowed Manson to once again access the creativity that had been heard in such abundance on Animals: the slow, boozey title track sounds like an industrialized version of something Marlene Dietrich might’ve sung in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel; there’s no way to classify “Doll-Dagga Buzz-Buzz Ziggety-Zag” other than as a heavy metal swing song; “Para-Noir” is an aural montage of a woman listing reason’s she’d fuck Manson (most of them in the vein of “for money,” “fame,” etc.) paired with a super-heavy, completely infectious chorus and a power-drill guitar solo; “(s)AINT” is the funniest hostile angry break-up anthem ever written.

“(s)AINT”
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That any of this works at all without dissolving into self-parody isn’t a miracle so much as a testament to the quality of the collaboration between Manson, Skold, and John 5. These dudes wrote the first industrial album since Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral that you can headbang AND dance to in almost equal measures.

And so what if the whole cheerleaders-in-the chorus bit was stolen from Faith No More? “(m)OBSCENE” is still a kick-ass song that gets my blood pumping every time.

“(m)OBSCENE”
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This album is the furious political protest the world had been missing since Rage Against the Machine broke-up. “This isn’t music, and we’re not a band/ We’re five middle fingers on a motherfucking hand,” he screams during “Vodevil,” an acknowledgement of music’s potential to inspire action.

Once again, Manson also found himself in danger of being misinterpreted by the morons of the world; those mistaking Weimar fashions for Nazi duds could be forgiven, and I’m not clear to this day if “Use Your Fist and Not Your Mouth” is an ironic critique of the Bush administration’s inability to settle conflict throug diplomacy, or a call for violence against that same administration. But, as with “Irresponsible Hate Anthem” or “Cake and Sodomy,” that’s not really Manson’s problem at the end of the day.

If there’s anything really wrong with The Golden Age of Grotesque, then, it’s that it’s almost too poppy, too simple; as good as it is, it doesn’t often feel like it offers new discoveries with repeat listens. But that doesn’t negate the fact that it rocks like a motherfucker.