Sometime during the summer before my sixth grade, I was gluing posters from teenage music magazines on my wall. It was the era of exchanging posters between friends. I don't know If the kids still do it nowadays. It was the period of big hormonal changes when you start searching for yourself through music and lyrics, and the only thing you are daydreaming about is how to fit in among your peers and appear as cool as possible. One of the posters had a pale face with a smeared lipstick and apple in his hand. I didn't quite understand it back then. I didn't even know whether I want to stare at that face or tear the poster apart.
It's been almost fifteen years since then. It was when Marilyn Manson dropped his best record Mechanical Animals. Alien zombie aesthetic, and angsty sections supported by insane guitar distortions got under my skin so deeply that I even considered making a tattoo for my eighteenth birthday that would have few verses and anarchy symbol. Tattoo dedicated to antichrist superstar. Twenty years later, Marilyn Manson releases epochal studio album, Heaven Upside Down, only a week after his birthday. I feel like a teenager again, full of accumulated energy, only without anger.
At the age of 50, dirty provocateur is still loyal to his mission of raising awareness of problems in American society. According to him: we are fucked up in this earthly heaven because of God, guns and government. Last year, he teased us with announcement of Say10 album. A decade ago, he would be a target of music and social critics due to album's crazy connotations. But the world is so apocalyptic and crazy that Manson comes off just as an angry adolescent. Yet, even though he changed the name of the album to Heaven Upside Down, he delivered what he promised. This is probably the most aggressive, raw and unapologetic record he had since Holly Wood. I plead guilty of constructing expectations before the album came out. Heaven Upside Down may not park in at first listen, but it definitely gives you an entertaining ride the more you play it.
Undeniably, today's kids that are exposed to cruel media reality won't be shocked or impressed with absurd biblical references. They also won't find many of his subversive ideas particularly titillating. I sound like a forty year old dude, but I can clearly perceive this record as juxtaposition with institutions we slave-work for. The man who built his career on upheaving religious authorities and provoking political leaders sticks to his shtick.
What makes Heaven Upside Down so great? Manson has finally caught the wave with his last two albums and now he is surfing on familiar body of water. He is not trying to transform, rather he wants to perfect his hybrid of blues, industrial and electronic that first appeared on Born Villain. Pale Emperor was the extension of a hybrid, and now the hybrid gets plastic surgery. Let's put it that way. Marilyn Manson does not push any postmodern personas in attempt to show himself as a critic. Instead, he gives us sagacious and unsettling verses in promotional single and Goth song Say10. Let's make something clear, we know where you fucking live // Open your mouth, love, like a glutted church, My goat horns are napalm trees, And a crown of thorns is hard to swallow. Manson celebrities his career while simultaneously noting that the world is about to be in the war again.
In Kill4Me, he questions whether he is deserving of death. He is nothing less twisted in electro-metal Je$u$ Cri$i$ when he proclaims: I write songs to fight and to fuck to, If you wanna fight, I will fight you, If you wanna fuck, I will fuck you. Still, he is at his best when he sublimes his pain in screams and hypnotic distortions in Blood Honey.
Heaven Upside Down is a big celebration of Manson's career. With the help of brilliant producer, Tyler Bates, dark master has created a damn good album with spine, balls and soul. The soul he'll sell to the Satan. Again.
