You can’t really blame me if I didn’t have high hopes for the most recent Marilyn Manson disc. I’ve learned the hard way that my loyalty to bands I loved in high school can all too often reap a harvest of shattered expectations (and a lighter wallet–well, a lighter wallet on the part of the band in question’s publicity department) when a new album comes along. I got seriously, seriously burned by the most recent Massive Attack, Korn and Ministry records, though at least the latter two had one good song apiece (“Here to Stay” and “The Light Pours Out of Me” respectively). So when I picked up Manson’s The Golden Age of Grotesque I ripped it to my iPod, gave its first four tracks a perfunctory listen and gave up.
Silly rabbit. Inspired indirectly by my wife, whose encouraging words often prompt me to revisit albums I’ve written off (though she’d shudder to find out she’d in some way encouraged me to listen to more Marilyn Manson than I otherwise would), I decided to give the album another shot. Smart move. Grotesque is really quite a record.
The thing about Manson is that each album, for all their superficial (and sometimes not-so-superficial) similarities, function on their own terms. Portrait of an American Family was his tribute to scary kiddie movies, basically; Smells Like Children, mainly a remix EP, continued in the same vein but introduced covers for a shot at airplay; Antichrist Superstar was his real bid for industrialmetal fame; Mechanical Animals was his take on glam; Holy Wood was a synthesis of everything that had come before, particularly its two immediate predecessors. (It was supposed to be the third entry in his “triptych,” a description even I, a great fan of overly ambitious rock projects, found pretty freaking pretentious).
The Golden Age of Grotesque is actually one of Manson’s more original conceits. In the months preceding its release he gave a lot of interviews in which he claimed hip hop was going to be a big influence on the record; for example, he cited with admiration Ludacris’s self-appellation of the title “Ass Valedictorian.” But now that the record’s out we’re hearing and seeing a lot of references to Weimar Germany’s cabarets, a favorite muse of Roxy Music, late-glam Bowie, even the Doors.
What Manson did, as becomes apparent on the record, is draw a parallel between the two scenes so obvious that it’s difficult to see: Both these movements can be summed up in the words “party and bullshit.” The Germans who frittered the nights away while their country slouched toward Bethlehem and the hip hop artists who rap almost exclusively about the size of the rims on their luxury cars while war rages and their fans (and sometimes themselves) are shot in the streets are perhaps the two purest exponents of style-over-substance that popular art has seen in the last hundred years. This fact is, of course, cast into starker relief due to the dire circumstances surrounding these Neroesque figures.
So Manson and his compatriots (who, with the apparently forced departure of longtime bassist, co-writer and best-friend Twiggy Ramirez, are looking increasingly like a remake of Village of the Damned as costumed by Jean-Paul Gaultier) indulge in the slick production, spastic beats, murky bass, tossed-off ball-court insults and cunning wordplay of hip-pop, weave in the glamour, excess, martial overtones and polymorphous perversity of cabaret, and come up with a pretty riveting brand of frightening metal. Highlights include the opening “Thaeter,” which in the grand tradition of creepy Manson album-openers sounds precisely like the tuning-up of the house band in hell; the first real song “This Is the New Shit,” which, surprisingly, is actually true; the final real song, “Vodevil” (pronounced “vaudeville,” you see); and the wonderful title track, which sounds an awful lot like an outtake from the darkest days of Bowie‘s Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dogs period and features the boast “We’re the Low Art Gloominati and we aim to depress.” Believe me, I’d have been depressed if this record wasn’t as good as it was.
Interestingly, another mercurial artiste came out with an idiosyncratic take on hip-pop right around the same time as Manson. Prince Paul (he of De La Soul and the incomparable Handsome Boy Modeling School) made Politics of the Business as a test to see if, despite his using all the production techniques and cliches of his jiggier peers, he’d still get shunned by radio and video simply by virtue of being Prince Paul. Naturally he uses the cliches a billion times better than anyone else–“Original Chryme Pays” features a verse from one of the Beatnuts about how he’s trained his children to help him shoplift clothing from department stores; how’s that for an original gangsta?–so naturally no one’s playing the record. A cryin’ shame: the Neptunes-worthy hookiness of “Make Room,” the blistering verse from Guru on “Not Tryin’ to Hear That,” and the hysterical wishlist rattled off by Kardinal Offishall on “What I Need” all deserve heavy rotation. (Look for a cameo by Ralph Nader, of sorts… apparently a friend of Paul’s who was slated to DJ at Nader’s MSG rally was asked to bring his own turntables. “He can’t rent turntables and he’s gonna run the country?” Yet another reason for Gore voters to dislike the ol’ spoiler.)