Marilyn Manson, The Internet and me as a Teen: A Rant of sorts

Manson was an influence on me before I ever heard much of his music. Around the summer of 1996 when I was about 10 he started to pop up a lot in conversation and small clips on tv here and there. He was in my peripheral vision and I got more into him a bit over a year later when I was 11 /12 and I started getting into radio rock music and culture.

I began religiously reading rock and metal mags, and Manson was one of the few voices who was really saying anything particularly interesting or different. This was before the internet was the organized thing it is now, and finding info was a lot fucking harder and we didn’t have a computer until years later (I used the library internet), so I got most of my cultural info and guides from books and magazines.

Manson was a gateway drug to a lot of ideas, he mentioned a lot of philosophy and art concepts that I may have otherwise taken much longer to find. I read his book before I got into his music around 2000 / 2001.

Around that time we finally had a computer in the house and I became obsessed with various message boards, some of the main ones being Manson boards. The Manson forums were where I found the most interesting and diverse ideas and people,  a lot of whom by then didn’t even like the music anymore but stuck around for conversation. That crowd was way more engaging and open than the homophobic, male-centric macho metal forums.

Reading those message boards was another of many really valuable learning experiences that helped me grow a lot.

This all probably seems weird to people who are more social, but I literally had no friends for most of my life at that time, so I didn’t have anyone to learn about subcultures or alternative ideas from. Message boards (along with magazines and books) turned me on to countless things: punk, satanism, goth culture, industrial culture, noise music, dada, surrealism, nihilism, etc.

So yeah. Marilyn Manson had a big influence in my life, as well as the lives of many other people. I don’t back everything he’s ever said and done, and at times he can be a douche, but I’ll always love the dude for providing hope to a version of me that was very fucked up and alone, convinced that I was the only person in the universe who wasn’t like everyone else.