(but this fake-breast-wearing musician is not so virtuous that he won't dis a celebrity or two.)

By Christina Kelly

Marilyn Manson taught me a new word: dystopia. My Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition defines it as "an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives." Marilyn Manson used it in a sentence when he was describing his band's new album, Mechanical Animals, the follow-up to Antichrist Superstar, the 1996 industrial concept album that propelled him to stardom (with a little help from his penchant for viewing back braces as clothing). "On Antichrist Superstar I was dealing with everything from my past and using that to try and become something very superhuman," said the 29-year-old singer. "So I shut off a lot of my emotions and numbed myself. Writing my autobiography forced me to examine my life, and I began to start feeling again. When I started to experience empathy, it felt to me like being and infant or an alien. Mechanical Animals documents that and dreams of a kind of dystopia."

I nodded in understanding. I mean, I did comprehend and appreciate almost everything-Marilyn Manson's tortured adolescence in Ohio has been well- documented in articles and in his best-selling autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell. I just had to look up the word dystopia. By the way, the interview took place in a hotel room in the SoHo Grand while Marilyn Manson's nice security guard waited in the other room (at the shoot two days before, I had spotted the guard reading a book called A Professional's Guide to Ending Violence Quickly). Marilyn Manson kept his sunglasses on the entire time, although he had drawn the drapes. I wanted to put mine on, too, but I didn't think it would be cool to whip them out, like a copycat. Marilyn Manson wore pinstriped pants and a sheer white shirt with blue markings on it (Gaultier?)-and sipped some amber liquid.

We sat together on a couch. I was pretty nervous, especially since I had seen David Letterman flailing during and interview with him. Dave obviously knew nothing about Marilyn Manson and was trying to wing it, and the musician having none of it. "He was wearing more makeup than me, and it scared me," Marilyn Manson told me. (Although Marilyn Manson wasn't made up for the interview, he said he reads Hane for the beauty tips.) I was more informed than Dave, but I had been faxed the lyrics to the new album only and hour before. I really wished I had more analytical questions. But he had explained his childhood time and time again in interviews and his book-stuff about how a perverted grandfather and a Christian school were defining circumstances for him.

While I fretted, Marilyn Manson continued his explanation of the thinking behind the album-which is more rock and less industrial than his previous work-and the feature film he plans to make as a companion piece to it. "The more I began to feel, the less that it seemed the world felt, and that's when I started seeing everything and everyone as mechanical animals-people that looked and acted human, but were, to me, metaphorically more like androids," said Marilyn Manson. "There was no soul or spirit inside." I grunted in assent. I asked Marilyn Manson how he had managed to shut off his emotions for all those years. "Mostly just by being self-destructive," he said. "I would put myself through a lot of physical pain with drugs or masochistic behavior. And that was something that transformed me, really. I find myself being a different person." Yet no therapy was involved. "I've tried a couple of times, but I find that self-examination works better for me than trying to explain it to someone else," he said. "I could end up working at the mall."

In the same time period that Marilyn Manson was getting back in touch with his emotions, he met his girlfriend, actor Rose McGowan. "It was at the premiere of Gummo," he said, referring to Harmony Korine's 1997 film about cat-killing clue-sniffers. "I'd been a fan of The Doom Generation [in which Rose starred] and read some interviews with her. Her childhood seemed to be even more fucked up than mine. I was just interested in talking to her. I thought if anyone could understand my life, it would be her. I haven't been away from her since." Rose might be in Marilyn Manson's movie.

Marilyn Manson also moved during that time, from Florida to Hollywood. "I've always been fascinated with films and stars. Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson and the whole Hollywood Babylon," he said. "I guess I just wanted to resurrect it." He began hanging out with stars, everyone from Billy Corgan to Joan Rivers and Leif Garrett. An unfamous Marilyn Manson (i.e., Brian Warner, his pre-rock name) would never be friends with an unfamous Joan Rivers; nor would they hang out if only one were famous. Think about it.

A lot of the songs on the record deal with fame, which is very common for a newly famous band. "I examined what I see fame doing to other people, and how I try and seperate myself from doing that, and how it isolates you, how it puts you in the position of an oddity or something," said Marilyn Manson, who wears breasts in the video for "The Dope Show." He said he did it in order "to represent vulnerability and sexlessness and how the world looks at me as something they can't fathom." If they didn't already, they sure will now. It's weird, because once you discount the getup, Marilyn Manson seems so normal, and most of what he says makes a lot of sense.

Another theme that runs through the album is drugs. I asked if he's still doing tons of them, but I apparently missed the point. "I meant narcotics as a metaphor for people's need to numb themselves," he said. "That's what Mechanical Animals is hinting at: that we're encouraged to not have emotions, to not be individuals, to not have an opinion." Oh. "As far as the message on the album, when it comes to drugs, it's not a positive or a negative," he said. "In the past I used drugs to fill a void. But now it is more of an inspiration or just purely for recreation. I don't do them in excess." According to the book, he's never done heroin but is a fan of cocaine.

What defines Marilyn Manson for a lot of people is his distaste for organized religion, a revulsion that he developed while attending that Christian school. His parents (whom he's been supporting financially ever since they got into a car accident two years ago) sent him there because they wanted him to get a good education. He got into satanism a bit as a teenager because one of his stoner friends had a Satan-worshipping brother. Once Marilyn Manson got famous, he met Anton LaVey, the late founder of the Church of Satan. Whatever to satanism-I'll chalk that up to youthful confusion.

"If God does exist, it's in music and in art," said Marilyn Manson. "I think there's more spiritually in what I do than in a lot of religious groups; judging, especially , in the way they've treated me in the past couple of years." He was referring to the candlelight vigils protesting his "ungodliness" at a lot of shows. "I've grown tired of talking about religion," he said. "It's time for me to move on. I'm trying to redefine the idea of spirituality and make it now such a bad word for myself, because I find that I sound really stupid saying it sometimes."

Most people feel stupid talking about spirituality. And those who don't feel dumb often end up sounding like Yanni. The genius of Marilyn Manson is that he doesn't. There's a definite spirituality trend going on with celebrities, and it reminds me of organized religion: It's what everyone else is doing. but Marilyn Manson really seems to have come to it from the inside out, instead of the other way around. That's cool.