Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Marilyn Manson's fans killed Brian Warner and now all that's left is Marilyn Manson - Part 2

(continued from part 1...)

As we explore the accusations made against Marilyn Manson please keep in mind that the purpose here is to evaluate everything individually. With someone like Marilyn Manson that has deliberately been pushing the edge of entertainment for 30 years and has not been secretive about his wild and obscene lifestyle, it's very easy to take things he has published or done over this time and point to them to try to confirm allegations. A soundbite here, or a sentence there. He is definitely an easy target.

It is for these reasons I have decided to take the approach to covering this that I have, to try to replicate the context and environment around the work and the accusations so that we are not retroactively punishing someone for yesterday's actions on today's morals based merely on allegations. This happened to Nolan Bushnell by the #MeToo movement and despite them being totally in the wrong they have never even apologized and in my books that is abuse, too.

Now I deliberately left off where I did in the last post as I did not want to begin exploring the accusations in part 1 of this piece. The majority (99%) of the accusations take place between 2006 and 2014 which fits my analysis so far. One accusation takes place during the Smells Like Children tour. Now before we cover this one accusation I do want to make the point that there are a lot of stories from this point in time floating around.

This was the time when numerous rumors about his concerts were occurring, not to mention intense scrutiny. He was reported to have had a rib removed (due to the cuts on his stomach from performances). Rumors were made that they sacrificed animals, and that he killed Trent Reznor's dog Maisie, and these rumors are still circulating and being accepted as fact today despite all being false. Also at this time Manson was not the powerhouse and protected or the household name he is today.

The other aspect on this I would like to point out is that at the time a lot of crazy stuff was happening at his concerts, and he was certainly having sex with a lot of women, that only 1 potential story about this time has come out while numerous from the 2006-2014 era have come out is definitely noteworthy.

Marilyn Manson has always reveled in confusion and in multiple interviews that took place later he is fond of saying art is a question mark. This also unfortunately makes it difficult to determine what is real, and what is false. Information from the time is not very accurate, the internet was not around and most reporting at the time was either mainstream, or word of mouth.

That being said it's also not hard to see this accusation being true and in one of the interviews in the last post Manson mentions how parents are paying him to manhandle their 14 year old boys and girls. Was this a reference to his shock value or something more? I can not say. The accuser does claim to have physical evidence but has not shared it.

The accusation is made by actress Bianca Allaine and is reported to have started happening at his Dallas Texas concert in 1995.

A post was also made by her directly on Facebook, which a Twitter user screenshot:

Obviously the most concerning part of this accusation is that he was sleeping with numerous underage women. The sex parties and such are not surprising, nor are the drugs, as he has admitted to those frequently and while unfortunate she does say in her post she thought it was consensual, at the time, though if she were underage her consent is not actually granted. One other noteworthy thing she says is that "Marilyn Manson is a sadist".

There is room for both concern and doubt of this accusation given how serious it is but with no other stories to go by from this era except those fabricated by Manson himself (we will get into that a bit later when we cover the autobiography) I will be excluding this accusation from the overall analysis until more details are available.

Understanding sex in the "goth" culture at the time is also important, here is a good overview.

(Also just FYI I was never personally a "goth", I liked the punk and grunge scenes)

One of Marilyn Manson's most infamous shows took place during this tour in San Francisco. The Smells like Children tour had a new set list from Portrait of an American Family, along with one of my favorite covers Gary Numan's Down in the Park and of course Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). It also featured some early renditions of music that would go on to Antichrist Superstar.

The experimentation, rumors, and antics of the Smells Like Children tour would set the stage for some of his wildest performances during the Antichrist Superstar era.

The process of writing Antichrist Superstar was chaotic, he has described the mountains of cocaine, sleep deprivation, pain, that the band subjected themselves to. This is the extent that Marilyn Manson has gone to put into his albums and performances. An interesting note in one article that describes the process. Please do read the full article but for the sake of later aspects I'll be addressing I feel this needs to be pointed out specifically here.

6. Sometimes even Manson wonders why he's doing the shit he's doing
As Manson's image of debauchery and inhibition grew, so did his sense that he needed to live up to that image. As a result, he sometimes found himself engaging in behavior that he wasn't even into at all, just to be "dirty." By way of illustration, the rocker shared the following lovely story in The Long Road out of Hell. One night, Manson went to the nightclub The Hideout with his then-girlfriend, Missi, and bumped into a girl who had given him oral sex the year before. When he drunkenly left the bar to take a leak, the woman slipped into the bathroom with him, rushed to the toilet and urinated. Manson looked away but she urged him to take a look at a ring inserted through the hood of her clitoris. She said she got the piercing when she was 15 and he wrote that he was disgusted by the "reddened, infected flesh" around it. Then, she took out a small Ziploc baggie of shitty cocaine and Manson snorted a bunch. What followed was motivated by neither love, nor lust, but rather sheer perversity. "I thrust my hand down her pants and violently yanked the ring on the hood of her clitoris, making her yell in pain, surprise or delight," he wrote.  "Then I thrust my thumb inside her, bending my middle finger around her and ramming it up her asshole. 'Why am I doing this?' I thought to myself. I wasn't trying to turn her or myself on. I was just trying to be dirty. The situation seemed to call for it. I could have just as easily stuck my hand in a garbage can and accomplished the same thing."

His girlfriend at the time Missi is mentioned several places and would overlap with the time of the accusation by Bianca Allaine. A number of other bad events occurred for Manson in this time also described in that article pushing him towards more experimentation with pain "to test my pain threshold because my emotional one had already been crossed."

(continues in part 3...)


Click here to recommend this post on progressivebloggers.ca and help other people find this information.

Richard Fantin is a self-taught software developer who has mostly throughout his career focused on financial applications and high frequency trading. He currently works for CenturyLink

Nazayh Zanidean is a Project Coordinator for a mid-sized construction contractor in Calgary, Alberta. He enjoys writing as a hobby on topics that include foreign policy, international human rights, security and systemic media bias.

Saturday, February 6, 2021

Marilyn Manson's fans killed Brian Warner and now all that's left is Marilyn Manson - Part 1

This is not an easy post for me to write but as someone dedicated to truth I feel I have no choice. I have been a Marilyn Manson fan since the days of Portrait of an American Family and I use it frequently as the soundtrack to this blog. I know his work, and his history intricately. I am not writing this post to tear this man down, to aid in the hunt to cancel him, I am writing it because despite his actions I care for the man and what he tried to do with his music and I feel that it is better to come from someone who does care, than someone who doesn't.

The purpose of this post is to provide my analysis of the available information, allegations, and to correlate these with his music and interviews along a timeline. But more than that to tell the story that I think Brian Warner wants to tell, but can't, because of his absolute dedication to and imprisonment by Marilyn Manson. I will provide my justification and reasoning throughout.

I have spent the past week analyzing points of view, interviews he has done, and of course reading the allegations. All of my research here is original I will not simply be rehashing what is currently in the mainstream media. As well as far as I have seen many of the interviews I'm going to link have not been discussed and are quite revealing, and unfortunately, incriminating.

I'm here to tell you a tale of how Marilyn Manson's fans killed Brian Warner. As I said, I don't want to rip the man apart I want you to understand the man, not Marilyn Manson, but Brian Warner. This truly is a sad story and I really feel for Brian and I want you to feel for him too, not just blindly cancel his work that I believe he literally sacrificed his personal self and happiness to make, for you, for the fans, and as he describes in one of the interviews we will cover, for victims. I want to tell this story because I think we, the fans, failed him and are in part responsible for him becoming what he has become.

My motivation to write this post despite the obvious potential hatred it might bring upon me is that this man's music helped me as it helped many people. That does not deserve to be cancelled and if I can help his fans enjoy his legacy and continue to help victims while helping to support Marilyn Manson's victims and freeing Brian Warner of his prison then I need to do that. Nobody else is.

I want to be clear this is all my opinion, I don't know Marilyn Manson and I wasn't there, all I know is what I have been able to analyze but quite honestly the man wears his heart on his music. One of the most important aspects of someone that commits a crime is motive and the only motive going around right now really is "he's fucked up". Yes, he is, but that is not the motive. I aim here to provide a real motive, a human motive, a motive people can understand.

This post won't be for the faint of heart I'm asking you to view the world through the eyes of Brian Warner because only then can you understand him, and why he did what he did.

I'm actually fucking crying writing this, I write about war and turmoil all the time and I never cry. This is hard for me. I ask that you listen to the music, to the interviews, to everything even if you don't like it. Don't skip through, take your time and really absorb and more importantly appreciate everything and to remember that this is a human being. I will be releasing my analysis in parts to allow time to digest the information.

To understand the motive, we must set the context.

The Early Days

We're going to start with his early years. 1991. This is when his band was still called Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids and didn't yet have a drummer, they won an award for best new band and features 'My Monkey' which would go on to make it to the Portrait of an American Family album.

At this point the band is all friends, no business. The songs are based on poetry he had been writing for years prior re-arranged for lyrics. I point this out because I truly believe that performing is the single most important thing in Brian Warner's life. I often see people say that he is simply trying to cash in with shock rock and I just don't believe this to be true. He has a message, he always has a message, and I believe it was the need for this message in face of expectations that has now eventually destroyed him.

Their early stuff was outrageous, for fun, for the shock value but behind all that the enjoyment of the performance.

The late Scott Putesky (Daisy Berkowitz) released some of the Spooky Kids music as a remastered album:

Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids became really popular, really fast. In their last show as Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids he mentions that record labels had been trying to sign them now for awhile but he couldn't find one that would allow him the creative freedom (I'm rewording it). He was effectively foregoing record deals to keep the Marilyn Manson character, and message intact.

(The quality on this next video is quite poor and the full concert is hard to watch so in this case I have time indexed to the appropriate spot.)

Trent Reznor signed Marilyn Manson and promised that his new label Nothing Records would provide the creative freedom Marilyn Manson required.

Portrait of an American Family

Marilyn Manson's sound, and art, were geared for performances. They were incredibly loud and heavy in person but the sound did not translate well to their initial recording of Portrait of an American Family. Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails helped to remaster the album for it's final release to replicate the live and in-person sound.

Live (and probably one of the best performances of the Portrait Era)

Original Album Recording:

Final Recording:

In this interview Marilyn Manson describes how his childhood is the basis for much of the music that would become Portrait of an American Family. This will become a recurring theme with each album reflecting an aspect of the troubled life of Brian Warner. 

Here is an interview from the Portrait Era where Manson describes how he likes smaller shows over large venues. I can vouch that this remains true to this day. When Marilyn Manson came to Canada in 2019 I ordered tickets in Saskatoon before the Alberta show had been announced. The arena was tiny, there couldn't have been more than 2000 people. It was incredibly easy to get up near the front as the show in compared to what he usually plays was so small. He put everything he had into that show. It was amazing, given his age. I can't believe he would have made money on that show, and yet he did an encore 3 times. He really enjoys being there, in and amongst his fans close up, giving them an unforgettable experience.

This fact of his dedication to the performance will be recurring throughout the analysis and is the primary basis of the motive.

It was also now that his performances had really begun attracting protests as he describes in this next interview and it is really these protests that would set the tone for what Marilyn Manson would become. No longer just an outrageous fun creepy rock'n'roll band, but a protest unto itself. Also please take note that he is quite shy in these early interviews and very reserved, he doesn't really do any theatrics himself and is actually quite focused on wanting to talk about the music and the show. I believe that this is Brian Warner speaking, not Marilyn Manson.

Smells Like Children

Smells Like Children is the Album, or rather EP, that really made Marilyn Manson famous as it had his cover of the Eurhythmics' Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) along with a number of other excellent covers such as Femminist Punk Rock Icon Patti Smith's Rock 'n' Roll Nigger.

The inclusion of this song, as the final song, I believe in retrospect really was a statement of what was to come. Marilyn Manson still plays this song live at concerts now and then today. He added an additional foreword to it...

And the world spreads its legs
And the world spreads its legs
For another fuckin' star!
'Cause I AM the all-American Antichrist.
I was made in America,
And America hates ME for what I am.
I am your shit.
You should be ashamed of what you have eaten.

The EP really is part remixes, part experimentation, and part cover songs. It also cemented the final image Manson had come up with for the Portrait era.

Of particular note is why Manson chose to do Sweet Dreams as he felt that the lyrics had been overlooked given it was a dance song and wanted to share how he felt about the song and it's meaning, described in this interview here:

He also describes how work was about to begin on the band's next album AntiChrist Superstar and describes it as a soundtrack for the end of the world.

(continues in part 2...)


Click here to recommend this post on progressivebloggers.ca and help other people find this information.

Richard Fantin is a self-taught software developer who has mostly throughout his career focused on financial applications and high frequency trading. He currently works for CenturyLink

Nazayh Zanidean is a Project Coordinator for a mid-sized construction contractor in Calgary, Alberta. He enjoys writing as a hobby on topics that include foreign policy, international human rights, security and systemic media bias.