MARILYN MANSON Talks About Inspiration Behind 'The Beautiful People'

MARILYN MANSON was featured in last week's Kerrang! magazine as part of a feature called "How I Wrote...", talking about the inspiration behind the song "The Beautiful People".

The Background:

Marilyn Manson: "I write phrases constantly and I have about 15 different notebooks going at the same time. I'll write lots of different things in each book. I have to lay them all out in the same place and pull things from each of them to write a song. I was on tour and I remember recording it on my four-track with Twiggy [Ramirez, bass] and my drummer Ginger in a hotel room. It was somewhere in the South, which is ironic. I remember playing the drum beat on the floor and then having my drummer duplicate that on the drum machine. It happened in one day pretty much. It happened maybe two-and-a-half years before 'Antichrist Superstar' was released, and if I played you that four-track recording, it would sound identical."

The Inspiration:

Marilyn Manson: "The term 'The Beautiful People' was inspired by a book that came out in the mid-'60s. It was about the Kennedys, politics and fashion at the time. The whole culture of beauty as being created at the time. We live in a world where the culture of beauty is taken for granted, but it didn't exist in the same way in the '60s. Then Charles Manson and his 'family' took that culture, hated it and reacted against it. In many ways his reaction is the same as mine, but I'm playing with it from both sides. I make things glamorous as a revolt to glamour."

The Legacy:

Marilyn Manson: "I wasn't thinking about it in terms like, 'Is this a classic?'. But I knew we'd arrived at our defining sound when we wrote it. Even now, when I go back and listen to it, it sounds big. I hear things in it that I didn't hear before. I'm still very happy and proud of it. I don't get sick of playing it live and I don't think I will get tired of it."

(Thanks: MansonUSA.com)