Marilyn Manson, nice guy

ON stage, Marilyn Manson looks like a long pale worm. Checking in at 6'1" and 135 pounds, he has a build similar to that of Manute Bol, a seven-foot, stick-thin former basketball player from Sudan whose career was tragically cut short by his inability to dribble, pass, or shoot. Manson is more fortunate. He can't sing or write song lyrics, but is nonetheless enjoying a run as one of the nation's hottest rock stars.

Manson is -- as his critics say -- certainly a symbol of American pop culture's continued race toward depravity. His latest album is titled Anti-Christ Superstar and his lyrics celebrate things like suicide, destruc- tion, and disease. But what Manson is about on a deeper level is our culture's premiere value: hype. The old injunction to "shock the bourgeois" long ago was amended to "shock the bourgeois -- and sell millions of dollars worth of albums to their children."

This weird marketing dynamic is suggested even by Brian Warner's stage name, Marilyn Manson. "Marilyn" is a reference to superstar Marilyn Monroe, "Manson" to super-murderer Charles Manson, a co-mingling of celebrity and criminality. The band's popularity is at least a partial validation of the idea behind Oliver Stone's odious Natural Born Killers, in which two serial murderers become beloved celebrities. Any publicity -- even as a deranged Satanist --is good publicity, so long as it filters down to teenagers ready and able to spend their parents' money.

At a recent show in Washington, D.C., the median age of Manson's audience was about 14. Parents paced in the back of the hall before the show like chaperones at a prom, one dad explaining how he didn't want his teenage daughter to come alone -- then fielding a cell-phone call from Mom. Other parents waited outside in cars to pick up their kids, who were decked out in black costumes, sinister make-up, and T-shirts reading "666" or "American by Birth, Anti-Christ by Choice." ("Mom, I'm going to listen to Satan music. Can you pick me up at 11 o'clock?")

The basic appeal of Manson's music is the same for teenagers as saying dirty words. The warm-up band -- an unlikely ensemble that played, of all things, three cellos -- at one point asked the audience, "Do you know what 'feces' means?" Everyone called out: "S -- !" (Hey, it's not an SAT word, but we'll take what we can get.) Manson, whose voice makes Bob Dylan sound like Pavarotti, sings one song that, as far as I can tell, consists almost entirely in yelling the word "goddam." His oeuvre also frequently features "mother-f -- -- ." The kids love it.

And why shouldn't they? Manson's act is a calculated attempt to take the two things mothers always tell children it isn't polite to talk about -- religion and sex -- and be as rude about them as possible. He sings the songs of his Anti-Christ album -- chronicling the rise of a world-destroying demon (or something like that) -- against the backdrop of a large stained-glass window and a cathedral facade. Ripping up a Bible is a frequent stage trick.

Meanwhile, the bare-chested Manson writhes on stage wearing women's nylons, a back-brace/corset, and long lace gloves up to his elbows. The get-up is designed to create as twisted a counter-image of sexiness as possible (one T-shirt on sale at the concert reads "Sex is dead"). Between inviting his audience to spit on him and cutting himself with broken glass, Manson will rub his own nether regions in what might be the most objectionable part of his show.

But, interestingly, the tyranny of niceness that Allan Bloom first identified on college campuses has become so widespread it infects even figures like Manson. Howard Stern recently starred in a movie about himself based entirely on the idea that he's a nice guy, even if he does make his living telling dis- gusting jokes in public. Manson too wants it known that he doesn't, as rumor has it, torture puppies or fellate fellow musicians on stage (he did the lat- ter only once). And even if he does belong to the Church of Satan, he's also an Episcopalian.

"Niceness" is the one value no one dares transgress. It's open season, of course, on everything else. I doubt kids take Manson's staged evil too seriously. But the iconography of his shows -- the self-laceration, the back-braces and bizarre crutches, etc. -- is a celebration of pain and perver- sity. He joins so many other influences in the culture -- the film Pulp Fic- tion stands out -- that treat cruelty, violence, and deviance as the subject matter of campy jokes or as casual tools to be wielded by a hip elite.

Manson will deny promoting any values whatsoever: he's just for people being themselves. His fans instinctively say the same thing, falling back on a tolerance defense that inevitably turns common sense on its head. One girl in black lipstick earnestly explained that Manson minds his own business, in con- trast to the Christian protestors handing out fliers outside the show. "Pass- ing out those little Christian papers," she assures me, as the lights go dim and Manson makes his entrance, arms spread wide in a none-too-subtle crucifixion reference, "That's wrong."

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