The New York Herald Tribune said he was “an unspeakably untalented and vulgar entertainer”. Ed Sullivan declared him to be “unfit for a family audience”. Cats and kids these days, just from these words, probably have a decent idea of who this is about even though they were said roughly forty years before his time and about an entirely different entertainer loathed by clean-cut, authority-minding people. After all, disgust with popular artists from our elders transcends generations.

Even a good many of Marilyn Manson’s fans, however, would wonder what it is about him that I admire so. He is, from all outside appearances, a cross-dressing heretic with a penchant for make-up, bondage gear, and assault on his bodyguards. What could possibly be worth respect from a young woman whose only real deviances are a taste for cheap jewelry and bad slash fan fiction?

He also happens to be a marketing genius.

He has created a persona that sells. Sure, Britney Spears did the same thing at about the same time. So did N’Sync. And Ricky Martin. However, the difference between him and they is that instead of being the first of the group and spawning a bunch of carbon copies, he went further in his respective personality than anyone else dared to attempt. I’ve yet to see anyone mimic the glam rocker pseudo-intellectual archetype with the same effect.

It isn’t just the way he looks that sells though. It sure as hell isn’t his singing voice. It’s the things he says and does. He follows the ancient formula for stardom that goes back further than the jazz age of the 1920’s. He pisses off parents and religious people. (Usually these are the same people, so it’s a two-for-one sale.)

For as long as there have been parents, there have been children to do things they don’t like. And liking something they don’t like has always been at the top of the Things We Don’t Like list. I think the clearest exploitation example of this I can give would be Ozzy Osbourne.

He was the lead singer of a band called Black Sabbath. Black fucking Sabbath. You don’t even need to be a religious zealot to know that wasn’t going to sit well with them. And they didn’t even have to listen to the music to know they didn’t like it. Twisted Sister, alternatively, cross dressed and sang about rebellion against parental tyranny, both things parents of the age didn’t care for. Those were both excellent marketing decisions that would lead their makers to stardom. The same sort of decisions Manson would make himself.

For instance, he knew his demographic was going to be the “Goth” kids. As one himself, he knew that there are two kinds. Satanists and Anarchists. Satanists, obviously, choose to worship Satan, usually as a form of revolt against their parents and society’s expectations of them. Anarchists, on the other hand, study Nietzsche and scorn current politicians, regardless of their stance on anything.

Rob Zombie is a good example of an entertainer who has a pretty good hold on the Satanist crowd, but he doesn’t address government so he doesn’t directly appeal to the Anarchists because of his messages. Type O Negative had the double market interest down, the political aspect so much so that critics labeled them as Nazis, but they lacked the showmanship to back up the devil worship crowd’s need for theatrics or mark them high enough on the fundamentalist death list to merit mass protests and publicity.

By singing about glam and gore, as well as society and government, and doing so while cavorting about in leather corsets and ripping pages from Bibles, he was able to appeal to both of them.

The one thing that set Manson’s promotional campaign apart from every other rock band’s, however, is the deliberate manner in which it’s done. I’m not talking about purposely biting the head off a dove to upset people. I’m talking about the way in which Manson presented his insurgence. He gave reasons for why he had dismissed Christianity for La Vey Satanism. He explained his discontent with the reigning authority. When he did something for an artistic reason, he told people why. He didn’t simply do things to do them; he did them with a thought-out reason. And when asked, he made no qualms about explaining himself.

Parents and their Because-I-Said-So tactics couldn’t fight back against that. Neither could religion’s Just-Believe-What-We-Tell-You strategy for that matter. And all the right people noticed this. Unlike most of his kind before him, he didn’t portray himself as a caricature of what a rebellious rock star should be. He fleshed the character out, gave it motivations, reasoning and rationality. He was dangerous because his character could be taken seriously as a person.

Parents staged protests and religious institutions called for boycotts, in their usual fashion. Pat Robertson openly decried him to his own fan base on television, in effect plugging Manson’s work. (Manson has stated that it became a guilty pleasure of his to watch the 900 Club just to see if he was mentioned that day.) However, claiming a man is the anti-Christ simply because he wears scary make-up and says things that make you shake your head after he has reasonably explained why he is no longer a Christian does not help to make him look that much worse. Especially to the “enlightened” kids he sells to. Apparently they didn’t learn from their battles with Osbourne, Twisted Sister, Zombie, etc because such actions, like always, only garnered more publicity for Manson and got his name out to more of his fan base. The age old tactic worked again.

But Manson also knows when to show some restraint. When Columbine High was attacked by its own students in a then-increasingly common school shooting, blame was placed on Manson’s lyrics as part of the reason for the students’ actions. While the parents of one of the victims were busy capitalizing off her last words, Manson (rather than claim defamation or something of equal assholery) offered his condolences and cancelled several of his performances. This reinforced what he had always said about his quarrel not being with believers themselves but with their religions. It also made him appear more human than the normal people who were decrying him. If public relations were a game (it’s not?), all their base would belong to him.

Manson has successfully marketed his image and work to tons of people simply by manipulating a small group of narrow-minded people. That in itself isn’t all that isn’t that impressive, but the way he did it is. He took the basis if rock and roll rebellion, borrowed key elements from successful artists that came before him, and molded it all into something so much more. I think that merits some idolizing, yes? Manson has created a persona so believable that it incites people into forgetting that it is just that: a persona. But when you step back and look at him as a whole, I think even the New York Herald Tribune and Ed Sullivan would’ve agreed with him when he said, “I’m really no worse than Elvis Presley.”