Rock is Dead
Rock is Dead
Words by Jaded
Today I laid my idol to rest. Along with all that the false prophet claimed to champion: Rage against the hypocrisy of the pious. Detestation for the mindless ignorance of the hordes, unconscious of their mechanical submission to the god of commercialism. And revelry in the impurity of humanity.
At the epicentre of his doctrine was honesty – in all its unclean, savage glory.
His following was swift and steady in an industry made fickle by the mainstream. And in a world where my own existence felt abstracted, I was drawn to this ideology of realism and the figure behind it.
My servile adulation of Marilyn Manson began in my pubescent years – and, as with all adolescent fanaticism – it was strong and misguided. His hate-filled vociferations embellished by melodic violence burned a pyretic passion within me. This was not because of some nihilistic proclivity, but because the imperfect sermonizer expressed all the pent-up rage for the world which ate at my insides, and unabashedly exposed that for which that same world had made me ashamed. He did it with relish. And he did it well.
The tone of his commentary on the human race was not laudatory, nor was it defamatory. It was real. Through his conceptual lyrics, Manson masterfully, and painfully, exposed the infection which oozed beneath man’s consciousness. Those blind to his message were lost in the allegory of facetious satanic references and calls to masochistic behaviour.
But I was not. I heard his gospel and responded in ardent allegiance to the evocator and his word.
His stage became the altar for my worship and I immersed myself in his creation. Sceptred-mic in hand, the hierophant held hypnotic sway over the masses with anthems of rebellion. And when Manson was persecuted for his non-conformist influence, in my mind he became deified, for his power was undeniable.
A decade on, and the god of rock sits upon a tarnished throne. Somewhere along the line Manson forgot his own preachings and stumbled into the role of grand illusionist, and the term “performer” has never been more fitting. The show remains a spectacle, but the line-up has changed. Songs that once stuck in my mind now stick in his throat and a disassociated, painted fool has usurped the place where Marilyn Manson once ruled.
The content panders to a generation unthinking and unfeeling, and as a grotesque parody of his former grandeur, the charlatan attempts pitiful seduction of the masses.
He succeeds.
His art is now defiled and defined by the generic. The hordes submit. Not to Manson, but to the once- spurned empire of commercialism. He no longer exposes man’s ignorance through his lyrics, but through his own ignorant masquerade as an artist. Perverse, frantic gesticulations and more obscene rantings are no more part of a shocking display intended to strip humanity of its righteous façade through antithetical exhibitionism. It is vulgarity for its own sake; a sacrilegious affair whereupon his self-constructed altar the megalomaniac sacrifices personal truth in exchange for the forbidden fruit of celebrity.
Engorged with profane conceit, he is unrecognizable; and apathetic, his albums become indistinguishable. Honesty has acquired a bitter taste and only sycophantism is palatable – something for which I have never acquired the taste. And as I listen to recurring petulant diatribes of an aged man plagued by nothing more than grandiose paranoia, sexual frustration and phallic fixation, I feel empty and disillusioned. I feel cheated.
His early tirades of anti-submission appear farcical in the face of his blatant servitude to the times. I can no longer reconcile my fervor with what is now pallid regurgitations and distortions of earlier works, and pieces of my conviction start to slip through the holes in his carefully-constructed lie of revolutionism. Ironically, the only revolution that has taken place is Manson’s own evolution into a product of the world he despised. The idol now stands not as the advocate of human truth, but as the harbinger of his own hypocrisy.
I bury the ashes of my once-burning passion alongside the golden calf. He is nothing more than an inert symbol of my naivety. The ever-insistent frontman’s ability to move me has atrophied. I denounce the heretic and lose my religion. I hold on to relics of an absent faith, but to hear his music again is now a mere exercise
in nostalgia.
