Manson isn't subversive, but he's an ace student of subversives past. He doles out little manifestos like: "As a performer, I wanted to be the loudest, most persistent alarm clock I could be, because there didn't seem like any other way to snap society out of its Christianity- and media-induced coma." Fine. This has been the goal of the avant-garde since before dada and it's hard to pull off. He's also fluent in the more American, postwar, what-are-you-rebelling-against?/whaddya-got? school of delinquency, claiming that cops make him nervous because "even when I'm not doing anything illegal I'm thinking about doing something illegal." He pulls pranks like cutting his arm with a razor blade in front of children at Disney World, bragging that "there's nothing like the feeling of knowing that you've made a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills." Isn't that so cute, in an "I just wanna be somebody" Mark David Chapman sort of way? This book is so by-the-book.

I actually felt a real kinship with Manson reading the earlier chapters about his upbringing in Christian school. I had a similar freaky '70s youth courtesy of the book of Revelation, and Manson's descriptions of his apocalyptic nightmares involving the Mark of the Beast in the form of UPC codes (considered by fundamentalists at the time to be one step away from systematic 666) nearly mirror my own less-than-sweet dreams of the era. But one thing Manson -- who's very clear about his will to shock -- and I don't agree on is the nature of the antichrist himself.

Manson's antichrist theories are probably more complex than mine. He sees the figure "not as a villain but a final hero to save people from their own ignorance. The apocalypse doesn't have to be fire and brimstone. It could happen on a personal level. If you believe you're the center of your own universe and you want to see the universe destroyed, it only takes one bullet." Manson claims this as his birthright, titling his last album "Antichrist Superstar."

I don't know about Manson, but where I come from, we Pentecostals received intensive antichrist-spotting training. And like everything we learned in Sunday school (and reinforced by two of my favorite TV shows at the time, "The Munsters" and "The Addams Family"), the rules were pretty simple. When the antichrist arrives -- there was no "if" -- he will not look like a demon. He will not be dressed in bondage gear, have tattooed arms, expose his bottom, wear goofy makeup or give his songs titles like "Kiddie Grinder" like Mr. Marilyn Manson. No, he will be beautiful. He will be loved. He will be blond. (At the time I pictured Robert Redford, but I realize this was a little off. There's something cold about Redford. There's a wall around him.) The antichrist would be a smiley, likable kind of Joe, a Kevin Costner type, in actor terms. The antichrist would be popular. John Carman of the San Francisco Chronicle was onto something recently, imagining that "if Clinton roamed the corridors of the White House shooting everyone in sight and then, soaked in blood, seized the airwaves to declare that he is the living antichrist, his rating would probably shoot up another 10 points."

In short, the antichrist will not be riffing on the songs of mass murderers like Marilyn Manson does with Charles Manson's "My Monkey." The antichrist will be a three-headed, tow-headed monster of harmony, filling your head with "MMMBop" bliss so that you don't notice he's stealing your soul. And that's why that joke imagining a band called Marilyn Hanson isn't even very funny. Wouldn't the two looks cancel each other out? Like, what happens with the hair combo when you superimpose Manson's goth black tresses on Hanson's goldi-locks -- what do you get, auburn? Wouldn't Marilyn Hanson look and sound just like Pavement? What's the fun in that? Because adding the healthy modern darkness of Marilyn Manson to Hanson's freakish light could only dilute the blond boys' delicious depravity.
SALON | March 6, 1998