Video of the Day: The Beautiful People

I used to be a fan of Marilyn Manson. While the only album I ever bought of his was his Lest We Forget: The Best of Marilyn Manson, I still borrowed and burned copies of friends CD's:).

Manson is good to listen to when you're writing horror, and I had him right up there in my collection with Rob Zombie, though I actually bought Rob's Hellbilly Deluxe, to this day one of my favorite albums.

What got me on this sentimental tear for Manson, I'll be posting a video of his each day, was the video for his new song Heart Shaped Glasses. Manson hadn't done much since his last album The Golden Age of Grotesque and I can't even tell you a single single from that album. The last descent song I remember (and own) from him was Disposable Teens.

I listened to Manson's latest album, Eat Me, Drink Me, while hanging out at a record store and I must say while I wouldn't want to deny any artist the right to move forward and change with their career, it made me miss the old Manson. I saw the "video" for Heart Shaped Glasses, mostly because James Cameron, my favorite director, directed it. While watching I had no idea why Cameron would have been involved with such garbage, aside from the opportunity to play with his new 3-D technology, something that the video was to be shot in. Aside from that it looks like something a film student could have done, not even as good as the videos from the very beginning of Manson's career.

It was crap is what I'm saying and it just made Manson seem all the more irrelevant than he'd already become. My friend Tasha once told me that everything has a time and place, and some things that were popular in their orignal time periods just managed to hit right when they needed to. I'd say the same of Manson. He came out in the mid to late 90s and hit just when the music industry was looking for a new rock star, an Alice Cooper for my generation. Now? No one gives a shit about Manson. I'd venture a guess that he'd become irrelevant by the early 2000s, as indicated in this gem of an article from The Onion. Watching Manson having sex (possibly real sex) with his 19 year-old girlfriend on his ex-wife's bed as fake blood poured over them didn't seem edgy at all, it seemed desperate and borderline pathetic. I highly doubt Manson will have the talent, popularity and influence he once had, and that's sad because for a while it seemed like he really had something to say when he wasn't molesting security guards. But time marches on, and sometimes people must be left behind.