Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)

Band: Marilyn Manson
Album: Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)
Best song: “The Fight Song” is pretty good.
Worst song: The entire second half of the album is disappointing.

I, like most reasonable people, adore The Onion. Not AV Club, which I also love, but rather the proper Onion. My relationship with it goes back, of course. In high school, one of my friend’s siblings went to University of Wisconsin, where it had begun and my friend would get copies of The Onion and laugh at it. This was, of course, before the Internet. I believe, its first foray outside of Madison was into Chicago, where we’d pick up free copies from newspaper boxes.

I have two favorite stories from The Onion. The first is the impossibly great “New Ted Nugent Cologne Tested On ‘Every Goddamn Animal We Could Find’.” Of course, this one came out when I was in high school and my later animal rights-y tendencies have just reminded me of its brilliance. It’s very hard to convince me of a funnier written sentence than “Then we ran out of cologne and just started punching the duck,” especially considering the context.

The other favorite story is “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People.” This one came out while I was in college, but remains just as clever and outstandingly apropos.

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The concept of “cutting edge” isn’t all that concrete, is it? Before my time — well, when I was a little kid — Madonna was cutting for singing “Like a Virgin” in a wedding dress and writhing around on a stage at the MTV Awards. Hell, way before my time, the idea of “spend the night together” was too titilating for Ed Sullivan in the 1960s.

And that’s where we have Marilyn Manson. I actually think he’s not a moron just in business to shock people — which, really, is the thesis of The Onion‘s brilliant takedown — but rather a half-smart guy who uses shock as a way to get people into his atheist (a nontheology to which I subscribe)/anti-authoritarian thing. That’s not without its value; if enough people hear “I’m not a slave to a god that doesn’t exist” and think “Hey, maybe this is all a silly fairy tale,” that’s probably for the best.

On the other hand…

To say that Manson’s oeuvre is an overreach is a little bit of an understatement. Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) is the third in a trilogy of concept albums in reverse chronology.

Yes, you read that right.

Music — especially popular music — doesn’t translate that sort of thing well. Pop music necessitates choruses and short(ish) lyrical phrases, which leaves little to nuance. As such, to try and populate an even mildly complex story is virtually impossible. This is why haikus are either very open-ended or very simple or both. Short literary spaces don’t make for anything other than lots of bad intrepretations (example: Manson’s work) or overly simple idiocy (Green Day’s American Idiot).

Don’t get me wrong. I adore concept albums and rock operas. But, the way to produce such things needs to follow any of four avenues to be effective:

1. Use the actual music genre and arrangements to reinforce the lyrical concept. The best example of this is the “intrusive security/paranoia” concept of Isis’ Panopticon. The intensity and building anticipation of the record mirrors Rear Window or The Conversation, two brilliant movies about surveillance.
2. Use an existing work of art to build from. Pink Floyd’s Animals and Mastodon’s Leviathan work from this concept. In the case of Animals, Floyd puts together a modern use of the characters Orwell created, whereas Mastodon’s use of Moby-Dick is more allegorical of the band’s journey.
3. Leave the album open-ended as to be far more in the “concept” than in the “rock opera” genre. OK Computer has this down pat, as does Panopticon. It’s more “feel” than “plot,” being abstract. In fact, when loose rock operas fail to be concrete rock operas, they might be really awesome concept records. The Downward Spiral is a lovely example of this. There’s a plot, but it’s hard to follow, so the album just becomes a love letter to nihilism.
4. The concept is weird and deserves drugs to appreciate. This works, too. Tommy, for example. Or Thing-Fish

Of course, the only perfect piece of art is, basically, all these things, save for not being based on a previous work. It is wholly original and wholly open-ended.

Marilyn Manson, thanks to his inability to say no to any interview, talks a lot about his concepts and his process in trying to put out his records. And he certainly uses the iconography associated with his records to augment his music.

He is not subtle.

It takes away from the concept, on some level. If Manson’s message was simply to shine a light on American society via the Columbine massacre — as much of the record does in a surprisingly effective way — the record might speak for itself.

But, like the kid with the jean jacket covered in patches, Manson gets his signals crossed a little. He’s too post-modern, in some ways, trying to ape The Wall and Ziggy Stardust at the same time as being some sort of horror rocker.

If he picked a route, this trilogy, while still too ambititious, might be a reasonable critique of ultraviolent American society. But, instead, Manson tries to hit every target on the map with his music and it all ends up in a sloppy mess.

(Supposedly, there’s an unplublished novel that’s supposed to accompany the record, presumably explaining some of the more complicated parts of the concept. There is no release date for said book and, really, we’re ten years out on this thing. I’m confident that it’s not happening.)
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Which is too bad. If the three albums in this trilogy and, specifically, Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) were simply albums, they’d have some highlights. And, as such, “Disposable Teens” is a fun little track. “The Fight Song” lampoons and echoes the concept of a pep rally shockingly well. “The Nobodies” isn’t a bad song itself.

But, that’s where the album falls off. The rest of the record, again, is a jumbled mess. Manson’s voice gets very old very quick and the metal tendencies of the band are wasted within the first half of the record.

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As I got older, I learned more about really insane people in music and not just half-smart guys who’d read half of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and decided that “God is dead” is a mantra on which to hang one’s hat. I mean, look to Norway to see shocking anti-Christian music and characters. A dude from Emperor murdered a gay guy for being gay. Varg Vikernes killed a bandmate and burned down churches because he calls Christianity “the Middle Eastern plague.”

You will not see these dudes trying to shock you. They just are shocking.