'Columbine Era Destroyed My Career': Marilyn Manson

The rocker gives an odd but entertaining interview to the 'Guardian'
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 22, 2017 5:15 PM CDT
'Columbine Era Destroyed My Career': Marilyn Manson
Marilyn Manson arrives at the world premiere of "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Monday, May 8, 2017, in Los Angeles.   (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

"Honestly, the Columbine era destroyed my entire career at the time," muses Marilyn Manson in an interview with the Guardian that is, in a word, weird. At the time of the Columbine school shootings the rocker was, of course, a favorite target of conservative groups in America, with many considering him evil and dangerous; when rumors came out that the Columbine shooters were fans of his music (turned out they actually weren't) he became even more vilified. In 2001, he was still receiving "daily death threats," he says. These days, the right has other preferred targets, and it's sometimes hard to remember the days when Manson was considered dangerous. But looking back on those days, Manson notes, "If [the Columbine killers] had just bought my records [instead of guns], they would be better off."

The rest of the interview involves Manson, among other things, jumping out at interviewer Alexis Petridis from behind the door of his room holding a realistic-looking replica gun, flicking Petridis' testicles to make a point about the difference between a person and a persona, and offering to wrestle Petridis. (The interviewer speculates the rocker may have had more than one "tumbler of neat vodka" over the course of his day of interviews with the European media amid his current festival tour.) Manson also, of course, promotes his upcoming eighth album and does quite a bit of what Petridis refers to as "self-mythologizing." Sample: "I wake up in the morning and I just realize that I am chaos. That’s my job—I am a goddamn tornado. You look at it, behold it, you get caught up in it, it tears off your roof—and I’m from Ohio, so I know about tornadoes." The full interview is worth a read. (More Marilyn Manson stories.)

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