Mechanical Animals
Mechanical Animals is the third studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released on September 15, 1998, by Interscope Records. While not abandoning the band's industrial metal roots, the album has a more mature, glam rock sound, inspired by David Bowie, T. Rex and Queen. The themes of Mechanical Animals primarily deal with the trappings of fame and drug abuse.
The rock opera and concept album is the second installment in a trilogy also including 1996's Antichrist Superstar and 2000's Holy Wood . Manson said in November 2000 that the overarching story within the trilogy is presented in reverse chronological order; Mechanical Animals, therefore, acts as the bridge connecting the two narratives and remains constant whether the trilogy is viewed in reverse or not.
The album has been certified platinum in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, and spawned the singles "The Dope Show", "Rock Is Dead", and "I Don't Like the Drugs " as well as the promotional single, "Coma White". The former has been certified gold in Sweden. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, making it the first Marilyn Manson album to do so.
Recording and production
Aborted sessions with the Dust Brothers
Following the conclusion of their year-long Dead to the World Tour in September 1997, the band relocated from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Hollywood, California. Work on Mechanical Animals began soon after. By early December of that year, the singer began opening up on the then new and unnamed record's development, sitting down with MTV's "Year in Rock" special on December 12. Early on, it was reported the new album would be produced by the Los Angeles-based production team, the Dust Brothers. According to MTV News, " have completed work on a few tracks on the next effort from Marilyn Manson..."During this early development stage, the band recorded in Manson's home recording studio in the Hollywood Hills which the group had taken to calling "The White Room" after the vocalist painted the space white. Manson explained that the studio "looked out over Hollywood, which kind of represented space to us." Manson also intoned, "the theme of whiteness comes up a lot on the album, representing a void empty of color and feelings and emotions. We were trying to fill that void with the songs."
Billy Corgan involvement
Manson's friend, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, served as an unofficial music consultant for the band. After playing a few of the early songs for him, Corgan advised that "This is definitely the right direction" but to "go all the way with it. Don't hint at it." Despite this, almost 20 years after the release of Mechanical Animals, keyboardist Madonna Wayne Gacy disputed "arrogant-yet-whiny ass" Corgan's involvement and claimed "the majority" of the album was "written long before Billy Corgan ever showed up." He went on to describe Corgan as pretentious and "thinks he's Brian Eno."Sessions with Michael Beinhorn and Sean Beavan
The band subsequently employed Michael Beinhorn as principal producer, co-producing the record with Marilyn Manson. Sean Beavan was also brought in to supply additional production work. According to Manson, the bulk of the material was written and recorded at that house before Beinhorn came on board. "For the most part, I had a very specific vision of what I wanted to do and how to do it."By May of that year, having completed his obligations for Hole's then-new album, Celebrity Skin, Beinhorn confirmed that the nascent Manson project was halfway complete and on course for a late summer or early fall release. Manson, for his part, spent the early part of the year on break from the studio to promote his autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell.
During his February 24, 1998, interview on National Public Radio's Fresh Air radio talk show to promote the book, he divulged that having exhausted the topic of organized religion in the previous record, Mechanical Animals would see a major shift in focus: "Both sonically and lyrically it's about the depression of alienation, rather than the aggressiveness of it. It's about the emptiness." Guitarist Zim Zum divulged that in one instance the band recorded a song a day for two weeks straight during a particular spree of creativity.
Final mixing and post-production took place in a studio in Burbank, California. In July 1998, after having contributed guitar work to 12 of the album's 14 tracks, Zim Zum left the band under amicable terms to pursue his own solo project. He was replaced by the former guitarist of English industrial metal band 2wo, John Lowery.
Concept and themes
In the album, Manson takes on the role of a glam rocking, substance-addicted, gender ambiguous "alien messiah" called Omēga. Much like David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, he falls down to earth, is captured, placed with a band called The Mechanical Animals and turned into a rock star product. He has become numb to the world, either lost or high in outer space or the Hollywood Hills, through excessive drug use as a coping mechanism with his life as a product of his corporate masters. Manson's other role is that of Alpha who is based on himself and his experiences around the conclusion of the Antichrist Superstar tour/era. Acting as Omēga's foil, Alpha's emotions have only begun seeping back. Vulnerable and trying to relearn how to use them properly, he despairs about how little emotion other people feel, observing them to be "mechanical animals"."There is a bit of a love story that exists on this record," Manson admits. "The name I gave to the thing I was in love with was Coma White. It starts as the name of a girl I'm in love with, then ends up to really be a drug I've been taking. So I'm not really sure what I'm in love with."
Subsequently, seven of the 14 songs are from the perspective, lyrically and musically, of Omēga and his fictional band The Mechanical Animals, while the other seven are by Alpha. The Omēga songs are typically those most nihilistic and superficial lyrically, such as "The Dope Show", "User Friendly" and "New Model No. 15". The album artwork features a dual liner note book, in which one half has lyrics for the Omēga songs, and when flipped over, has those for the Alpha songs.
Marilyn Manson later noted in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine that "Mechanical Animals was to represent the point where the revolution got sold out, a hollow shell of what the essence of Marilyn Manson was. It was a satire, and a lot of people interpreted it as 'This is what he really is.' I was making a mockery of what I was, taking a shot at myself."
After the release of Holy Wood , Marilyn Manson revealed that his concept album trilogy is an autobiographical story told in a reverse timeline. That means Holy Wood opens the storyline followed by Mechanical Animals and concluded with Antichrist Superstar. Further, though Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals made sense as individual concept albums on their own, there was a hidden overarching story running through the three releases. In transitioning from Mechanical Animals to Holy Wood , Manson admitted that the character of Omēga, " was a ruse to lure commercial mall-goers into the web of destruction – I've always planned that from the beginning."
Composition and style
Mechanical Animals, while not abandoning the industrial metal sound of the band's previous work, draws more heavily from 1970s glam rock. Critics have also described the album as electronic rock and gothic metal. Manson explained that he had grown "bored" with that musical aesthetic adding that, "everything you hear nowadays is an offshoot of NIN, Marilyn Manson, Ministry. There's just no great rock albums anymore. There's a lot of rock music out there, but it's very bland and disposable. A lot of people may say this record is over the top, pretentious and theatrical, but that's what rock music is supposed to be about." Mechanical Animals also marked the first time NIN frontman Trent Reznor provided no production input.In both music and imagery, Mechanical Animals draws heavily from the glam rock genre that dominated the UK Charts in the early 1970s. Rolling Stone noted the songs are marked by shimmering, flamboyant guitar grooves and strong melodic hooks while the lyrics "trade the topic of teen satanism for drug-addled space themes and sci-fi love stories", reflecting "Manson's self-proclaimed new 'glitterati' lifestyle," and described his crooning as evocative of "the sultry vibe of T. Rex's Marc Bolan". However, both Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly noted that while the album drew from glam rock, it did not revel in the "naughty-boy insouciance" and playful hedonism of the genre despite numerous references to drugs, decadence and lurid sexual escapades. Rather, it was "glum and pessimistic" and more preoccupied with the themes of alienation, insincerity and longing only hinted at by the genre.
"I just wanted to approach this album from a different point of view. I'd assumed the role of destroyer on the last record. This role is more a savior. I wanted to write songs that were more personal and dealt with specific emotions. The music had to really compliment that, but there wasn't a conscious effort to make more accessible songs. There was simply an effort to write songs that would make people feel differently to the songs on the last album. In a sense that makes it more accessible, but it's not just for the sake of pop. Even if it was, that's okay too. I can appreciate the Spice Girls and Garth Brooks in the Andy Warhol sense of it - pop art."
Its ultimate sources are the goths: Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, and early Cure. 'The Speed of Pain', meanwhile, is redolent of Pink Floyd's 'Welcome to the Machine'.
The song "Great Big White World" raised concerns, among some groups, of possibly being a racially motivated reference until Manson himself cleared up the rumors by stating that it was about cocaine. "I Don't Like the Drugs " features guitar work by Dave Navarro.