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Marilyn Manson, b. 1969, musician
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 28, 1999 He stood an arm's length away from everyone, the very picture of pouty-lipped, post-punk rock 'n' roll attitude. He wasn't even the biggest star in the room. Lounging at Manhattan's Bryant Park after the MTV Video Music Awards in 1996, shock rocker Marilyn Manson shared finger foods with the likes of Courtney Love and Jenny McCarthy. Across the courtyard, rapper Tupac Shakur stalked the grounds with a battalion of bodyguards, days before he would be shot to death on a Las Vegas street. And yet Manson's star power sucked the air out of his vicinity -- and not just because of the shock-white pancake makeup and jet-black lipstick. A vision of horror-charged menace in black fishnet stockings, leather and Alice Cooper-style face paint, he was '90s-style Caucasian teen rebellion in the flesh. He was riding high on an anti-authority ethos first crafted in his Fort Lauderdale bedroom -- an ethos that had sold millions of records worldwide. "I'd like to show America that all the things that terrified me as a child I've become as an adult," said Manson, born Brian Warner 30 years and many miles ago. "I'd like America to be afraid that something they made can destroy them." Suggest this skinny geek as a Florida pop music legend and some music fans will roll their eyes. After all, Gloria Estefan in Miami has sold more records, Tom Petty from Gainesville has more critical respect, and the Backstreet Boys from Orlando are better perched on pop music's shining edge of what's happening now. Even Jimmy Buffett's shameless baby boomer fantasies get more respect than a lanky, androgynous rocker who once cut himself with broken bottles onstage and begged fans to spit on him. Still, Manson matters, mostly because his goth-drenched, deliberately profane vibe so completely captures the angry, feral spirit of '90s nihilism. Fed by a rocked-out industrial sound and button-pushing lyrical messages, it's a message that has galvanized a legion of black-clad kids. Doubt his status as a cultural force? Then consider which rocker took the most heat after the Littleton, Colo., high school massacre this year. Early pictures of a freckle-faced Warner in childhood -- revealed in his biography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell -- show an average kid from an average family. But, as he details in the book, his transformation from a buck-toothed Warner to jaded, drug-addled Manson symbolizes the seamy underbelly of Florida as a Disney-fed, tourist-filled paradise. His healthy contempt for hypocrisy in the hyper-righteous -- born during a stint in a Christian middle school and honed in South Florida rock clubs -- has become the band's deliberately decadent performance art. Viewing icons of religion, family and authority through a prism of bondage, blood and violence, Manson birthed a potent stage spectacle that entranced fans and scared everyone else. Like it or not, many kids these days get that. Now on the national stage, he has traded in goth's stagy horror for a home in Los Angeles and glam-rock image. But the questions continue. Does his success -- platinum awards for the band's last three records, a book that was a New York Times bestseller and engagement to "it" girl actor Rose McGowan -- signify an ironic triumph for his anti-authority, think-for-yourself message? Or is it just a really good con job? Manson -- whose contempt for authority is matched only by his disgust at those who blindly follow his lead -- would likely laugh and leave it to others to decide. * * * Eric Deggans wrote about pop music for four years before becoming the Times' television critic in 1997.
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