Manson Marilyn

American shock-rocker, rising to the top of the charts on a platform of drag, nudity, arson, drugs and Satanism. His stage name was formed by combining and juxtaposing the names of two American pop cultural icons of the 1960s: actress Marilyn Monroe and criminal Charles Manson. The self-proclaimed "Antichrist Superstar," Manson carved out a goal for himself of becoming the most controversial entertainer of the ‘90s, whose show has at times included skinned goats heads and a fluorescent "Kill God" sign, all under the umbrella of free speech with the express intention of "exploring the limits of censorship." Though widely dismissed by critics, his brand of metal nevertheless struck a major chord with the youth market, comprised almost entirely of disaffected white suburban teens - primarily through the same sort of marketing that Madonna does so well, in-your-face performance spectacle such as that which lends a jubilant perversity for kids drinking beer and getting high at spring break. "The cops also made a big deal about a show where Marilyn put some guy’s d*** in his mouth onstage," said one of the band-members after the show, his eyebrows shaved, eyelids streaked blue and lips pained purple. "But we’ve done much worse things than that. I had my 11-year-old brother onstage in one of the shows completely naked. It was like child pornography," he laughed. Manson was brought up in a middle-class family, the son of a carpet salesman and a nurse. He had pneumonia three times as a kid. He attended Christian Heritage School in 1974, which he hated. His parents raised him with trust and respect, even taking him to his first KISS concert. His dad has become a familiar sight at Manson shows, distinguishable by the fact that he’s the only gray-haired gentleman walking around wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt. His mom still calls him Brian. In an interview, Manson related, "My father had a very violent temper, and he was never home, so I was kind of a mama’s boy. But I had a weird relationship with my mom as a kid because it was kind of abusive - but on my part. I wish I could go back and change the way I treated my mom because I used to be really rude to her, and she didn’t really have any kind of control over me." One of the Manson T-shirts reads, KILL YOUR PARENTS. "I first started having really vivid dreams as a kid around the same time when I was spying on my grandfather masturbating," he says. "I used to take pictures of naked women, and I would cut out just their sex organs. And I started having really violent dreams that I was going that to real people. It freaked me out as a kid." He was fascinated with the devil, with abortion, with sex, and terrified of scorpions. He recalls losing his virginity at 16 on a baseball diamond. "It’s kind of ironic because I hate sports." When he was 18, the family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and he got a job as a music journalist. In 1989, he and guitarist and fellow misfit Scott Mitchell formed a band, with Mitchell adopting the name of Daisy Berkowitz and Warner naming himself after Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson. Aiming to outdo Alice Cooper, KISS, Howard Stern and Ozzie Ozbourne, with a dash of P.T. Barnum thrown in, Manson took shock rock to boundaries never before scaled with a campaign of crass aggressive self-marketing techniques, including a newsletter, a hotline, and most notably, a series of eight (now highly collectible) self-produced and distributed cassettes. Each of the addi Read less