Shock absorbed

Transgressive art is a risky business: not because there’s a chance you may offend people, but because there’s a chance you may not. As plenty of artists have found out before Marilyn Manson, it’s hard to sustain a career on innate shock value. When you’ve attempted to demolish every moral code held dear by society, what exactly do you do for an encore? Repentance? Emotional transparency? Juggling?

In Manson’s case, the solution is evidently to do it all over again, dressed up in some amusing new theories. The Golden Age Of Grotesque is the sixth album by Brian Warner, the tall, clever, preposterous and occasionally quite talented Floridian who’s spent the past decade transforming himself into Marilyn Manson.

Purportedly inspired by Weimar cabaret and burlesque theatre, his act comes loaded with theoretically outrageous imagery: quasi-Nazi uniforms; blackface minstrel make-up; sadomasochistic romps; the allure of the freakshow. One interviewer visited Manson’s house in Los Angeles and found a foetus suspended in formaldehyde on the coffee table, introduced as Ludwig. Prurient tabloids, meanwhile, recently thrilled to rumours of our hero’s alleged sexual exploits with a pair of Siamese twins.

Of course, all this desperate flaunting of depravity sometimes seems rather sweet. We’re reminded of the sulky Goths who hung around suburban shopping centres in the 1980s, talking about seances and serial killers, seeing chipped black nail polish as a means of undermining the fundamental tenets of straight culture. Or a blustery right-wing columnist whose entire job is to rail against that most imaginary of horrors, political correctness.

In America, however, Manson is taken a little more seriously. After the Columbine school shootings in 1999, it was he who many blamed for the tragedy, indirectly, after the murderers were discovered to be fans of his music. More recently, he found himself in court in Michigan accused of sexual assault, when a security guard took exception to having Manson’s crotch come into contact with his head during a gig. A Satanist out to corrupt his nation’s youth, it’s widely assumed. A pernicious threat to the sanctity - or, more accurately, the homogeneity - of American life.

Should we, then, take him seriously? As a dangerous force for evil, he doesn’t really measure up, unless a priesthood in Anton LaVey’s kooky Church Of Satan and a fetish model girlfriend (Dita Von Teese, connoisseurs should note) count. As a perceptive commentator on the idiocies of his country, he deserves more serious scrutiny: few who saw Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine will have left the cinema thinking Manson’s ideas and demeanour were more disturbing than those of, say, Charlton Heston.

If only he could express himself with more eloquence on record. In spite of the Weimar schtick, The Golden Age Of Grotesque is hardly a radical departure from 2000’s Holywood. As usual, the formula is a canny mix of glam, heavy metal, industrial Goth rock and 1980s electropop. Beyond his new penchant for bowler hats, a cabaret influence only appears on the title track, and even then David Bowie is a better reference point than Marlene Dietrich.

As usual, too, it’s all quite entertaining in a stomping, anthemic sort of way - at least until, like most of Manson’s albums, it runs out of steam two-thirds of the way through. A truly great long-player continues to elude him, but Manson remains a brilliant purveyor of brash, stupid, memorable singles: the tortuously named mOBSCENE, with its chorus of malign cheerleaders, is a fine successor to I Don’t Like The Drugs (But The Drugs Like Me) and Disposable Teens, among others.

What rankles is Manson’s apparent inability to put the intelligence and wit of his interviews into his music. The catalogue of deviance is becoming a little mundane now and his endless proclamations of radicalism ring increasingly hollow. The first proper track begins promisingly, with Manson satirising the exhausted rhetoric of rock’n’roll. "Rebel rebel party party sex sex and don’t forget the violence," he cackles. But when it comes to positing an alternative, he doesn’t get much further than the song’s title, This Is The New Shit. And given that new collaborator Tim Skold’s old band, KMFDM, were doing something not musically dissimilar 15 years ago, even that’s pretty questionable.

The New Shit, it seems, is a taste for rotten puns. Besides mOBSCENE, songs are lumbered with names such as (s)AINT, Para-noir and Vodevil, the latter sounding more like a telephone company than a Satanic offshoot of Vaudeville. There is much talk of "Scabaret sacrilegends" and "Low art gloominarti", which might briefly tickle the 14-year-olds in Manson’s congregation, but doesn’t exactly cut it as great subversive art.

It’s all very curious: a highly entertaining pop star and an articulate social commentator, but one who is most famous for his weakest role - that of a provocateur. If he abandoned the hackneyed shock tactics, it would allow Manson to investigate what are, for him, real taboos - humdrum lives, the peculiar allure of the mundane - and genuinely surprise us. Gardening and golf instead of atrocity exhibitions: now that would be perverse, wouldn’t it?