Antichrist Superstar is the second studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released on October 8, 1996, by Nothing and Interscope Records. It was recorded at Nothing Studios in New Orleans and produced by the band's eponymous vocalist along with Sean Beavan, former Skinny Puppy producer Dave Ogilvie and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. The recording of the album was marred by excessive drug use, which provoked a high level of antagonism between band members. Consequently, it was their last release to feature contributions from founding guitarist Daisy Berkowitz, who was acrimoniously fired partway through recording.
A rock opera and a concept album, Antichrist Superstar was the first installment in a trilogy which included succeeding releases Mechanical Animals (1998) and Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (2000). The central storyline on the album revolved around a supernatural being who seizes all power from humanity in order to initiate an apocalyptic end event; a populist demagogue who is driven solely by resentment, misanthropy, and despair, he uses his newfound position to destroy the world. The record can be seen as a social critique, utilizing this premise as a metaphor for the perceived fascist elements of the conservative political movement and the Christian right in North America.
Preceded by "The Beautiful People", whose music video received three nominations at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, the album was both a critical and commercial success. Lorraine Ali of Rolling Stone credited Antichrist Superstar with ending the dominance of grunge within popular music. In the years since its release, various publications have listed it among the best albums of the 1990s. The album debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, and has sold almost two million copies in the United States alone. As of 2011, worldwide album sales had surpassed over seven million copies.
The album was supported by the controversial "Dead to the World Tour", which was heavily criticized by elements of the Christian right. Nearly every North American venue the band visited was picketed by religious organizations, predominantly because of unfounded, exaggerated claims of onstage drug use, bestiality, and Satanic rituals, including animal and even human sacrifice. The band also found itself the target of congressional hearings, which attempted to implicate the group in a fan's suicide. Several previously unreleased recordings were issued on soundtracks throughout 1997, including "Apple of Sodom" and "Long Hard Road Out of Hell".
Background and development Marilyn Manson was formed in 1989 by the vocalist and by the guitarist Daisy Berkowitz. For the next seven years, the name of every band member was created by combining the stage name of a female pop culture icon with the surname of a male serial killer. Their highly visualized concerts quickly earned them a loyal fanbase in the South Florida punk and hardcore music scene. Within six months of forming, they were performing sold-out concerts in 300-capacity nightclubs throughout Florida. Eventually, the band gained the attention of Nine Inch Nails vocalist Trent Reznor, who signed them to his Nothing Records vanity label; Reznor produced their 1994 debut album, Portrait of an American Family. This was followed by the 1995 EP Smells Like Children, which contained their commercially successful single, a cover of the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)".
Recording and production
Antichrist Superstar was recorded over an eight-month period at Nothing Studios in New Orleans by an extensive group of musicians. Along with the remaining members of Marilyn Manson—Twiggy Ramirez, Madonna Wayne Gacy, and Ginger Fish—Nine Inch Nails guitarists Robin Finck and Danny Lohner and drummer Chris Vrenna participated. The record was initially produced by the vocalist alongside Trent Reznor and former Skinny Puppy producer Dave Ogilvie. The process of creating the album was long and difficult, highlighted by experiments involving near-constant drug use and sleep deprivation in an effort to create a violent and hostile environment suited to the album's content. Manson has admitted to heavily experimenting with prescription painkillers—including forms of morphine sulphate and hydrocodone—during recording; he also claimed he regularly inserted sewing needles underneath his fingernails to test his pain threshold.
Initial sessions were unproductive, and routinely culminated in the destruction of the studio, as well as the group's own equipment and instruments. There was also a high level of antagonism between band members, with most of this directed toward founding guitarist Daisy Berkowitz. He later claimed to have been "shut out" of recording sessions, and alleged that much of his equipment was destroyed, such as the four-track recorder which had been used to produce many of the band's early demos, along with his drum machine. The latter was subsequently revealed to have been thrown from a second-story window. This animosity resulted in Ramirez performing the majority of guitar work on the record.
Berkowitz was highly critical of Reznor, who, he said, purposely destroyed a Fender Jaguar given as a gift to Berkowitz from his then-recently deceased father, explaining: "I was in the studio, and they were all in the control room, and I'm playing guitar. At the end, Trent says, 'Do it again, but do it more like this.' We went through this three times, and he says, 'Hold on. I'll come in there. Let me show you what I'm talking about.' So I take my guitar off, hand it to him—and he smashes it, just to fuck with me. Then he laughed and left the room." Berkowitz acrimoniously exited the group sometime after this incident. Reznor's relationship with the rest of the band—Manson in particular—also began to deteriorate during production, primarily as a result of creative differences. Manson and Reznor have not recorded material together since the release of Antichrist Superstar.
Ogilvie was eventually blamed for the band's dysfunction, and was fired as co-producer. He was replaced by frequent Nine Inch Nails mixer Sean Beavan. Manson and Beavan then spent several weeks reworking and remixing the majority of the album in Nothing Records' auxiliary recording facility; Reznor had started production on the soundtrack to David Lynch's Lost Highway in the primary studio, and was often absent from these later sessions. Manson went on to praise Beavan's influence on both the album and band as a whole, describing him as being "like a magnet, drawing the band back in the studio and back together." The pair are the sole credited producers of three songs on the record: "Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World", "Kinderfeld" and "Minute of Decay". Berkowitz's replacement on lead guitar joined the band shortly after the album was completed. Timothy Linton adopted Zim Zum as his stage name, ending the seven-year tradition of naming members after female icons and male serial killers; his name was derived from the Lurianic Kabbalah concept of tzimtzum.
Concept and themes
Antichrist Superstar is a rock opera concept album, and its title is based on the 1971 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar. The central storyline of the album revolves around a supernatural being—a demagogic rockstar—who seizes all political power from humanity in order to initiate an apocalyptic end event. This underlying concept was both inspired by and a tribute to the work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically his philosophical concept of an Übermensch. It was also influenced by "the idea of putting yourself through a transformation to become something superhuman", which Manson said he garnered from Nietzsche's The Antichrist. The album is a social critique which utilizes this premise as a metaphor for the perceived fascist elements of the conservative political movement and the Christian right in North America. Manson also cited David Bowie's "We Are the Dead" (1974) as a major influence on the album lyrically, saying: "I remember hearing [that] song in the Nineties, when I first moved to L.A. It wouldn't have had the same impact on me if I'd heard it when I was a kid in Ohio—it felt like it was about the culture of Hollywood, the disgusting cannibalism."
Composition and style
Antichrist Superstar is primarily an industrial metal, industrial rock, alternative metal and gothic rock album, and contains material which has been described as death metal, progressive metal and new wave. The record is separated into three sections: "The Heirophant", "Inauguration of the Worm", and "Disintegrator Rising". In the final section, the central character transforms into the Antichrist Superstar: a populist demagogue whose motivations transcend any conceivable sense of morality. Nihilistic and disgusted by humankind, it initiates a genocidal extermination of the human race, eventually destroying the entire planet. The album is also cyclical, with both its opening and closing seconds consisting of the distorted phrase "When you are suffering, know that I have betrayed you".
Ramirez composed much of the music on the record, and regularly asked for input from Reznor, who he said was "the only other string musician" in the studio on a regular basis, elaborating: "Writing the songs was nothing, but going in and recording them we made some changes. It was nice to have [Trent] there, like another member of the band to help me have another outlook at some of the stuff, because Daisy had run out of ideas and just did not contribute whatsoever." Reznor is credited with co-composing the music of three songs on the album. After the release of Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) in 2000, Manson revealed that Antichrist Superstar formed a conceptual trilogy alongside both the aforementioned album and 1998's Mechanical Animals. He explained that the trilogy was an autobiographical story told in a reverse timeline (chronologically reverse from their release dates), with the storyline beginning on Holy Wood, followed by Mechanical Animals, and Antichrist Superstar acting as its conclusion. Furthermore, although Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals made sense as individual concept albums, there was an overarching story running through each release.
Cycle II: Inauguration of the Worm
"Cryptorchid" is a shorter track that can be thought of as an interlude. The title is both a compound of the words "crypt" and "orchid" and a direct reference to the medical condition of cryptorchidism. Stereogum called the song a "uniquely beautiful track" and identified its roots in the avant-garde and ambient genus of industrial music comparing it favorably to the music of Coil, "albeit an unusually rock-centric one." The song is divided into two sections. In the first half, Manson's vocals are rendered deadpan using several layers of microphone filters while it is altered in the second with a vocoder to augment a Mellotron played over a pulsing sinus rhythm. On close listening, the phrase "I wish I had balls" is whispered repeatedly in the middle to bridge both sections. Crowning it the band's 6th best song in their top 10 list, Stereogum mused of "an alternative history" where the band explored the song's experimental direction further throughout the record.
Cycle III: Disintegrator Rising The title song ends with Apple Inc.'s 1990's synthetic speech program PlainTalk (also known as MacinTalk) voices repeating, "When you are suffering, know that I have betrayed you". MacinTalk voices are used again in the music video. During live performances of the song, the MacinTalk voices repeat "You might as well kill yourself — you're already dead" at the end of the song.