Music Monday #2: Lest We Forget: The Best of Marilyn Manson

In the first post in this series I alluded to the tumult that I went through in 2004, during that time I met a lot of new people when I moved around and thanks to that expansion in my horizons I was also introduced to a lot of music that I hadn't explored before.  One album came as a gift from one of the students in my class at college and that was 'Lest We Forget: The Best of Marilyn Manson' - this is one of the greatest hits albums I chose to include in this list because it includes a selection of songs from the artist that I love that otherwise I'd have to include several albums to get them all in.

My favourite track on the whole album is a cover of 'Personal Jesus' originally recorded by Depeche Mode.  Personal Jesus meant a lot to me in particular it served as a way to process thoughts and feelings I that were still unresolved after my Grandfather had died earlier in the year, and in years to come when I lost other family members in particular when I lost my Grandmother it was again a track that I turned to when I couldn't process what I was feeling.  In this vein (S)Aint also served as a way to resolve internal conflict that I had which it isn't really important to go into depth explaining right now suffice to say that most people who are raised in a religious environment reach a point where they have a crisis of faith and they need to find reconciliation either in accepting what you have come to reject or in accepting the new reality of abandoning that mindset - for me it was the latter and the struggle to define exactly what I believed when everything I had built up fell apart. 

At 16 that's something I think most people aren't yet equipped to process - I am 31 now and I am still not able to fully process it and I don't know many people who could either.  Sooner or later you come to accept that what you believe has to be defined by your own faith in whatever form that takes, some people throw themselves into fields of study and devoted themselves religiously [ironically] to that field of study and take the empirical knowledge and facts that exist within it as their new foundation to build their lives upon.  Whatever works for you, personally even now years later there are few things in life that I believe can be taken as a given and a certainty upon which you can rely - I think in many ways this is why some people react to violently to new scientific discoveries and new data that contradicts decades old teachings, gender politics in particular as an example is something that changes as scientific understanding advances but even those who advocate scientific reason and fact based beliefs refuse to accept that change and hold to old erroneous conclusions as dogma - the reality being the ultimate realisation that religion isn't the problem, the problem is following something religiously, you have to be able to question everything and if you hold anything as sacrosanct then it stops being something that is resilient and built on logic and reason and transforms into something that is built on faith rather than facts.

There's nothing wrong with the latter for the record as long as you can accept that reality and understand that you can't expect others to accept it too if they don't share in that faith.  Marilyn Manson in many ways for me represents controversy in its literal sense to contravene the verse or to disrupt the stream, that and the concept of questioning authority and pursuing your own free will and deciding for yourself what you believe in and yes the irony does not escape me that Brian Warner chose the name Marilyn Manson as a portmanteau of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson the latter being a cult leader and cults embodying authority and conformity but that's the point of Marilyn Manson, it's supposed to be ironic and it's supposed to piss in the face of people who want to decide for you who and what you are.

Manson is inextricably linked to The Church of Satan, which for most people there will be an immediate aversion and the belief that it entails worshipping the Devil in the same way that Christians worship their depiction of God, but what The Church of Satan represents in reality is quite the opposite.  Manson is a priest of the Church of Satan and understands the tenets that underpin its philosophy, and it's important to point out here it is a philosophy, if you swallow the apprehension and actually take the time to explore it in depth what Anton LaVey created was not unreasonable and again ironically as the case may be actually represents a belief system that most people actually implicitly live their life by even those who have never even heard of LaVey.  In particular the concept of kindness to those who deserve it and vengeance rather than turning the other cheek - these are tenets most people actually live their lives by in practice, treating others with kindness until they give them a reason not to, and seeking revenge on those who wrong them.  The LaVey doctrines ultimately prize free will and self indulgence and represent counter culture when culture itself doesn't deliver what it promises it's only natural that some people will find it when seeking out alternative beliefs and reassurance when they try to make sense of the world.