Metal Hammer spoke to Marilyn Manson while out in the US on the Rockstar Mayhem tour. While the mainstream press continue to trivialise one of the most intelligent minds in metal, Metal Hammer felt the need to ask him the questions that you really want to know the answer to.
Marilyn Manson talks about his reputation as a nihilist:
“It’s a weird thing because I’ve thought about this concept of when someone says “I don’t care what anyone thinks, I’ll do whatever I do!” To me that’s a misnomer because I do care what people think in different ways: I care about the people I know and love the most, but I also care about what the people I don’t know think in the sense that I want them to think and understand me in a certain way. I don’t base my life around either one and I don’t change the way I live to please either set of people, but I do care.”
“If I didn’t care I wouldn’t be an artist, I’d be a nihilist and nihilism seems very exhausting. There’s no point in being any sort of artist or writer or painter or mime or whatever the fuck you want to be if you don’t care. You have to care in order to be able to put something into the world otherwise there’d be no point. It doesn’t mean that I’m positive all the time or that I’m a humanitarian or democrat or republican or any specific thing, except I can’t possibly be a nihilist because it contradicts art. You can be completely reckless and hate the world, you can be agnostic or many things, but nihilism, if you want to talk about what people define or misdefine me as, is not really possible. Yes, I’m reckless and sometime express no concern for my own well being and I express a misanthropic view of the world, but to have an opinion you can’t be a nihilist.”
Ven Apr 09, 2010 2:24 pm Da eriketta_manson
