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The Stool Pigeon Interview with Marilyn Manson can be read by clicking below....

The Stool Pigeon: I want to ask you about the role of transgression in rock music, where transgression is going, and even if the outrageous, controversial rock star of the late 20th Century might be redundant.

Marilyn Manson: I think by its nature it’s redundant. You can’t really ever make any art without getting someone’s attention... constantly. You have to say something differently, constantly. Dali said that anyone who doesn’t steal isn’t an artist and you have to take things and make them your own, and then when you’ve done that, you have to realise how not to cannibalise yourself, but how to transform constantly. This record I’ve just made allows people to witness that I’ve made a transformation. All music comes from heartache and all music comes from pain and suffering. That’s never going to go away, so it’s how do we learn to adapt to the fact that the whole world is able to talk really loud now? You know, everyone’s a journalist now - everyone’s got an opinion - and I think that just levels the playing field. Andy Warhol told us that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes and he was very accurate. So we have to invent new ways to make it interesting to other people because we’re trying to appeal to other people. You have to make this conversation interesting to someone else who wants to read it.

SP: One of the last things Plato wrote was - and I’m paraphrasing - what’s got into the kids? The kids have gone fucking mental. So that thing of fearing what the next generation is up to has always been with us. But I’m also talking about the hyper-acceleration of culture. Say, for example, if you had written a song like your new single ‘Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon’ as the follow up to ‘Lunchbox’ at the start of your career, people would have found it a lot more shocking than they do now.

MM: Oh, I think it is completely unshocking and completely intentionally redundant and that was the whole point of it. I really go out of my way to make that fit into the record. In the context of the record, it refers to something I said that day going to the studio. It was my commentary on how shameless and hopeless and uninteresting things are now. When you have to put ‘goddamn’ and ‘motherfucking’ into a title that already has ‘Armageddon’ in it... you know! I was just making a point. Anyway, I didn’t write it - the Bible wrote it - I just added a couple of new words to it. If it were Scrabble and I just threw the letters down and they came up that way, would it be my fault that they ended up in that sequence? [laughs] Not really. I just pushed the button. Queue applause. And people clapped. Canned laughter. You know what the worst thing about canned laughter is? That everyone on the tapes for canned laughter is dead now. So it’s a room full of dead people laughing at me.