201. THE FORBIDDEN BEAT - Should I Stop Listening to Marilyn Manson?

Growing up in the 1990s, coming from a dysfunctional family and being interested in all things horror and gore, it is unsurprising that Marilyn Manson quickly became one of my favourite artists. Already primed for his music and presentation with a pre-existing love of Alice Cooper, David Bowie, Stephen King and Clive Barker, I saw the video for ‘Sweet Dreams’ and was simultaneously scared and delighted. The next weekend money was exchanged down at the local record store for his ‘Smells Like Children’ EP, and soon after the band’s debut album ‘Portrait of an American Family’. When ‘Antichrist Superstar’ came out it was like a date of national significance to me and my friends. ‘Mechanical Animals’ became the soundtrack for my college days, starting to formally study philosophy at A-level, and I remember spending my first Christmas in the sixth form reading his recently released biography with great interest. Indeed, it was interviews with Marilyn Manson which first introduced me to the philosophy of Nietzsche. It was Manson’s anti-religious ideas which, mixed with the punk rock atheism of Bad Religion and NOFX, first made me and my friends start asking the theological questions which led to the decision to study philosophy.

I say all this because this week I, like many, watched the new three part documentary on Channel Four - Marilyn Manson: Unmasked - detailing the many allegations against the rock singer for sexual and emotional abuse in a series of violent and controlling relationships.

Though Marilyn Manson (real name: Brian Warner) had a huge place in my life as a teenager, as I grew up his music and ideas held less interest. On a technical, musical, level, I realised with ‘Mechanical Animals’ that what I really liked about Manson’s music was Trent Reznor’s amazing production skills, and when they stopped making music together the sound was less interesting. Next album, ‘Holy Wood’ felt empty and samey. I was growing up and Manson’s music was standing still. The next five albums of his passed into the world without my hearing them. I’d grown out of my Marilyn Manson phase. At least I thought I had until in 2015 my Spotify algorithm alerted me to a new single that I quite liked the sound of. I heard the associated album, ‘The Pale Emperor’ and loved it. Even saw the subsequent tour for follow-up album ‘Heaven Upside Down’. It was a form of nostalgia more than anything. And I didn’t really think too much about it. By the time the 2020 album ‘We Are Chaos’ came out, the nostalgia was already waning, and soon after I heard there were allegations against him, along the line of other #MeToo scandals. I wasn’t surprised, but didn’t look too closely into it. Listening anymore felt wrong, so his music went back on the shelf.

When I heard the documentary was out I thought it would be a good opportunity to find out more. I have long struggled with the question of separating art from artist and whether terrible actions of an artist should have any bearing on the enjoyment of the art they produce. Like many alive today, things that had once brought great joy and comfort - music, movies, books, paintings - have been tarnished as revelations have come out about the creators of those things, and I have been intrigued by my own different instinctive responses. Sometimes the revelation has made me never want to engage with the art again. Other times, the love of the art has remained, forcing it to become a guilty pleasure I dare not share with others.

As I watched the Manson documentary, I was immediately struck by my instincts in this case. Choosing not to use any of the music of Marilyn Manson in the documentary, avoiding Brian Warner profiting off the thing with royalties, I found myself triggered by the Manson-esque soundtrack accompanying actual live footage of the band on tour and early images from music videos to want to listen to those old albums again. Songs I’d forgotten about for years but were rooted deep in my childhood bubbled up in my head and I found myself driving to work blaring out ‘Portrait of an American Family’, an album I hadn’t listened to in years, followed by ‘Antichrist Superstar’.

Perhaps it was just a matter of timing. The weekend before, my wife and I had found ourselves going down a YouTube rabbit hole of dark 90s MTV videos. Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Rammstein, Faith No More. Things with broken doll parts and jagged camera angles. Face paints and cracked mirrors. Lots of mud and dirt and a preponderance for giant magnifying glasses and squirming insects. Ironically none of the videos which came up were Marilyn Manson, but they reminded us both of Manson’s videos we had watched back in the day.

Whatever it was, an attempt to educate me on the horrific actions of one of my former favourite musicians served only to remind me of their excellent back catalogue. And while I was there on Spotify listening to the classics, I noticed a brand new album from a few months ago I would have had no idea about had the documentary not come out.

As I listened to these old - and new - songs by an alleged serial abuser, I wondered how I was morally squaring this with myself?

Firstly, I wasn’t denying the likely truth of the allegations against Manson. Some fans are, and they listen still to his music in defiance and opposition to the women who have come forward. I wasn’t doing that. I believed them. So why wasn’t I shocked and horrified?

I think it was because, frankly, I wasn’t surprised that a person like Marilyn Manson would abuse people. That was part of the dark and sinister persona which had drawn me in in the first place! I mean, the first EP I heard, ‘Smells Like Children’ was literally Manson playing the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and intentionally drawing on the aesthetics of being a potential child molester! His terrifying cover of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ was definitely an ode to something creepy and non-consensual and most of the lyrics to his debut album ‘Portrait of an American Family’ alluded to crass and illegal pornographic acts. Manson’s was never a worldview that projected safety and morality. It was deliberately and provocatively transgressive. A Nietzschean test of dominant morality and Will to Power all of its own. I had never liked Marilyn Manson because I thought he was a wise role model or moral being. I liked Marilyn Manson because he represented a dark side in humanity and society and articulated that violence and horror well. Discovering the violence and horror was something that bled into his personal life was not a shocking revelation to me, it was entirely expected. I never thought he was a saint, so nothing had materially changed about my views on Marilyn Manson besides giving specific names to the victims of exactly the sort of depraved relationship I had always assumed the monster might engage in.

Perhaps this is why I have never really stopped enjoying Michael Jackson either? The so-called ‘revelations’ about him were rumours already well known when I was a young child listening to ‘Thriller’ on my parents’ record player and moonwalking my way through school discos. Jackson was a well-documented ‘weirdo’ (‘Wacko Jacko’ as the tabloids used to call him). There had never, for me, been a time when the music I loved wasn’t produced by a creepy oddball who was rumoured to be doing inappropriate things to kids. So when those rumours became as close to confirmed as could be in the wake of his death, it was hard to say my worldview was tipped on its head. Likewise, Woody Allen. By the time I came to his work on late night TV as a teenager, the scandal with his step-children was already out there in the world and I could see his problematic outlook presented in plain sight in his classic film, ‘Manhattan’. It was with that knowledge I discovered his comedy and the enjoyment came in spite of knowing what kind of man he was. Though it took Hollywood and the critics a long time to catch up, and I would say I haven’t seen a recent Woody Allen film that was that good, those old classics which I saw in full knowledge of what a terrible person he was supposed to be didn’t stop being brilliant just because the auteur behind them wasn’t virtuous.

In each of these three examples, of course, my love of the art also occurred at an early and imprinting time of development. Those childhood or teenage years where things hit deep and become entangled in your identity and memories. When I listen to Michael Jackson, I am back talking to my grandmother about why I like ‘that terrible man’ instead of the classical music and opera she preferred and smile at the memories of her sending me cuttings from the New York Times of ‘your friend’ whenever she saw his name in print. When I watch an old Woody Allen movie, I remember connecting at last to the Jewish part of my heritage and the New York my mother grew up in. When I listen to Marilyn Manson I remember the dark times of my adolescence that music got me through. My friends and I scaring ourselves to death with speculations about what devilry and occult forces listening to that music might open up. Those first forays into philosophy as we recognised such ideas to be foolish.

Contrast this with my reaction to bands like Anti Flag or Lost Prophets, who, when scandals broke out about their front-men, I stopped listening immediately and never went back. Each band, bluntly, meant nothing to me emotionally. A few good tunes amongst a music collection of a billion good tunes, all competing for space. Nothing lost to stop listening to one and listen more to something else.

But I suspect it would’ve been different if I had more emotional attachment to these people before I learned of their transgressions. Indeed, I remember a student in my form a few years ago who did still listen to Lost Prophets despite the atrocities committed by their singer, Ian Watkins. He said he couldn’t help it - they were his favourite band and meant too much to stop listening to.

Once again, it seems, our rational minds become beholden to our emotions and logical argument falls away when faced with a stronger emotional pull. My trying to make sense of it is, perhaps, a fool’s game because the response is, by nature, nonsensical. Like discovering your father is a serial killer but loving them anyway because they’re still your dad.

But I did start to think about part of what makes the logical disconnect so easy when it happens, and it comes back to my general question mark over the efficacy and justness of punishment, as well as the ontological separation of the artist themselves from their art.

Once we separate the piece of art as its own aesthetic experience completely disconnected from our feelings about the person who produced it we recognise that such separation is not always possible. Would you feel the same disgust about the music of a particular band if it were merely the keyboardist who turns out to be a rapist and not the lead singer and songwriter? What about if it is just their longtime producer? After all, Harvey Weinstein was an interesting case in that there is no doubt the deserved hatred towards him destroyed his career and, if he does not die in jail, would make it entirely unlikely anyone in Hollywood would want to work with him again. And yet, as merely a producer and distributer of movies, despite a brief shiver of disgust when the Weinstein Company logo appears before a cherished old movie, the movies he merely funded haven’t been removed from the canon of pop culture. We can see that financing a movie doesn’t leave the same artistic imprint as writing, directing or starring in it. The man can be punished, but the art need not be. But I wonder if this is more due to our confusion about how art is produced than any reality of the case? After all, in a very real sense the movie would not have existed without the finance, any more than the music would have existed without the keyboardist or producer.

Would we feel the same disgust about a band we loved if it were merely the publicist who had committed the scandal? Without the publicist, we would never have heard of the artist. It is entirely down to their getting the word out that we do. Is that not enough to make their moral shortcomings relevant to our enjoyment of the art that they peddled? Or what about the cover designer who created the imagery that made us want to pick up the album in the first place? Do we stop listening to the music if the photographer who shot the cover image is a serial abuser?

Many of the arguments around not listening to the music of such people come from a very logical seeming idea that ceasing listening ceases financial support and economic endorsement. But how often do we check the deals of all associated with a release to be sure that by paying money to a squeaky clean band we are not still financially benefitting a more nefarious member of the team around them? Or, flip it around, should the vile acts of one prominent artist upend the livelihoods of all who work with them? And, famously, does streaming something on Spotify even financially support a band anymore?

In all of these cases of high profile offenders getting away with terrible things in plain sight while producing their art, I wondered if it is our misplaced individualism which causes the cognitive dissonance. We blame the artist for their behaviour instead of the systems around them which enable it. From the localised managers and agents who procure drugs, drink, women, men and turn their collective blind eyes, to the economic system of capitalism which incentivises such behaviour to protect the cash-cow from prosecution which could mean financial collapse for the whole operation. If your only source of income in a famously insecure business is the success of this one artist, and you know this artist to be a predator, there are too many other pressures crowding out the morally right one. A homeless person who did the right thing is still a homeless person. Better to keep the house and keep your mouth shut.

And if everybody keeps their mouths shut, then on a very real level, no matter how monstrous the behaviour of the artist, what else do we expect when the signals they have received have been to keep on doing whatever they are doing to keep them happy? As teachers, as parents, we all know that developing humans push boundaries to see where those boundaries are. That saying ‘no’ is important, even wanted, by a young transgressor so that they can see that these boundaries are real (ethics, remember, may simply be a social construct, after all!) An adult human is still a developing human in a world with as much entrenched inequality as our one. An artist might know what the boundaries were when they were a ‘normal’ person, but now they have power, what new things are they allowed to do? The lack of ‘no’ at this level and the normalisation of abuse is not entirely down to individual behaviour. It is the collective responsibility of all involved (except the victim) for revealing boundaries to be flexible at a certain level of power and influence.

Not listening to the music of a monster doesn’t stop the monstrous things from happening because the monster is ultimately just one part of a huge, interconnected, cultural and economic machine which needs re-writing across all sections of shared responsibility. Consumers, yes, we play a part, but there are many more elements of enablement before the artistic output gets to us and we form our emotional attachments. And even here, it is more complicated than seeing the consumer as a binary yes/no individual. Why did teenagers like me in the ‘90s listen to Marilyn Manson and others didn’t? Because those of us who were a bit messed up, those with problems, were attracted to the darkness and nihilism and others with different home lives weren’t. Situations out of our control which shape us, our tastes and buying habits. In a society which produces a Marilyn Manson, and finds that this music becomes popular, the society must begin to look at itself and ask what went so wrong.

Manson always was a symptom and not a cause of the social sickness he personified. Watching the documentary this week simply reminded me that the world which created him continues to fail to confront the true causes of its sickness, and points the finger at individuals we can demonise instead of looking in the mirror and asking why such demons continue to exist.

Our obsession with punishment for individual crimes at the expense of ever opening our minds to the true causes of crimes and working meaningfully towards a world where those crimes would no longer happen is once again at work. We jail the drug dealer instead of asking why people need drugs to get through the day, we imprison the thief instead of asking what circumstances led them to take another person’s property, and we cancel the abusive artist instead of thinking seriously about what made them commit abuse.

All of which is to say, I’ll probably still listen to Marilyn Manson every now and again, as I still listen to Michael Jackson every once in a while and watch Woody Allen movies. I won’t feel great about it, but I won’t feel terrible. And in the meantime I’ll continue trying to work towards a world where sexual abuse, domestic abuse, emotional abuse, and the economic and social systems which enable and perpetuate them no longer exist. Both things can be true. We can hate the artist and still enjoy the art, even if it troubles us. In fact, if it troubles us, all the better. Because something needs to change in the actual world if we want the artists that world produces in the future to be different.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My own book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com