Marilyn Manson and his music are blamed for violence and shooting all the time, as everyone knows, the musician was cited in 1999 as a source of inspiration for the Columbine shooting in which two high school students shot 21 people and killed 13. In 2009 a Louisiana eighth grader attempted to commit suicide after trying to shoot a teacher, when a staff member refused to say ‘Hail Marilyn Manson!’ And these are only two examples…
Manson has repeatedly been accused to provoke teen suicide or horrible massacres, but in an interview to NME, the Goth star puts the record straight, he can’t feel responsible for anything of this sort:
‘You can’t blame anything on anyone unless you don’t take control of yourself. I realized I could not blame other people for my failures or mistakes or I would be taken the rule of not having control of my life, and it’s hard to get control of your life,… people identify with music because they feel they can’t identify with anything else’
‘If I was literally responsible for something I would take credit or accept the responsibility, if I did a crime I would take the punishment, but I’m not going to accept any blame for things that I make, because people should be responsible for their own actions.’
‘If someone kills himself, that’s really unfortunate but that’s Darwinism, that’s survival of the fittest’
Ouch, he could have kept this last part for himself, since I hate when people bring Darwin in this kind of things, it is just a distorted vision of Darwinism which has nothing to do with his theory. But what can I say? Manson is Manson, he is not going to show any empathy, it’s part of his game. It’s logical to think people should be responsible for their own actions, but it is so much more complicated than this. Plus Manson is an adult, an old guy, and we are often talking about adolescents, even less able to take responsibilities for their own actions. I am not saying his music should be blamed for anything, any shooting or other act of violence, not at all, he puts some art in the world, people are gonna receive it and it may spark things off for a few unstable or even crazy ones, but anything else could have done it… I understand Manson’s point of view, still some young people are very impressionable, we always reason as if we were all the same, able to distinguish reality from fiction, unfortunately some can’t, and horrible things happen. Manson’s music and stage antics should never be blamed for these things, but saying that everyone should be responsible for his own actions is also totally delusional.
In the first part of the video, Manson is also kind of comparing himself to Jesus, ‘It’s the same reason they crucified Jesus’, even saying he ‘created this mythology’, ‘ the Faustian story about Mephistopheles, and the idea of making a deal with the devil’… but he is releasing an album this week, ‘The Pale Emperor’, so it is not now he is going to step down from his grandiloquent pedestal.