Hype means you’ll be forgotten tomorrow.

I remember when Guitar Hero games were ubiquitous and inescapable. Game stores seemed built out of Guitar Hero boxes. Then, for no perceptible reason, people stopped playing them, people stopped buying them, and game companies stopped making them. The franchise imploded like a bubble in the Marianas Trench. Three years later, it’s actually getting hard to believe that Guitar Hero games even once existed. Gone…all of it gone…

Marilyn Manson was huge in the mid 90s, and a national tragedy made him huger. But there was always this deadness at the centre of the Manson hype. He clearly wouldn’t be around for long. Nobody cared much about what he actually said or did, and certainly nobody cared about his music, people only cared about his image — the evil satanist rockstar, and his image that often forks away from the truth (Manson’s only involvement in the Church of Satan was to accept an honorary priesthood while a guest of Anton LaVey’s.

He also marked an ominous cultural tidal change: the exploitation and monetization of controversy. Amazing, once people thought that getting arrested or sued or libelled in the papers was a bad thing. Now, you milk it for all it’s worth, and guys like Manson showed us the way. Bad press is a like a psychotic millionaire sugar daddy. Some say you should avoid him. But say and do the right things, and you can go on the ride of your life, even while he’s breaking your teeth off at the gumline with his fists.

Between these two points, the music often gets overlooked. At times it seems music is the least important part about this band. Antichrist Superstar is Manson’s most enduring album, but it is flawed. It is as long as NIN’s Broken and Ministry’s ???????? combined, and is inferior to both those releases. The band seems to be too busy chasing heroin around on tinfoil to write good songs consistently. It has many impressive moments, but they don’t flow steadily or reliably.

“Irresponsible Hate Anthem” is noisy punk rock song, in one ear and out the other. “The Beautiful People” is great, it’s catchy and features an instantly recognisable tom-tom beat by Ginger Fish. The whole album has really good instrumentation. The songwriting often gets floppy, but all the parts are played with intensity and conviction. How to make a Marilyn Manson album: pack the rafters with talented musicians, supply drugs, and hang on for dear life.

The album is long as fuck, and full of frustrating Good Cop/Bad Cop songs that entertain and bore in clear-cut, alternating sections. Occasionally there’s a genuinely thrilling idea (the thrashing chorus of “The Reflecting God”, the Black Sabbath riffing on “Kinderfeld”) and then the band drops it like a senile old-timer dropping a TV remote. “Cryptorchid” is a pure waste of space, just a mess of ambient industrial shards.

Manson’s voice is commanding and creepy, although he has some tics that never really sat well with me. His cutesy falsetto is just plain annoying, as is his habit of taking a pithy lyric and shouting it over and over again, as if he’s worried we’ll miss the point (with good reason, as it happened).

Antichrist Superstar is unique and powerful, but it is not quite a classic. It’s strength is mostly in its heraldry: it’s the most shocking, the most outrageous, etc. Musically, Manson never learned the difference between songwriting that articulates fucked-upness and songwriting that’s plain fucked-up.

It is generally agreed that Marilyn Manson’s phenomenon is more interesting than Marilyn Manson’s music. If you yourself agree, you may want to read this book, which is all phenomenon and zero music.

Published in 1998, shortly before the release of Mechanical Animals, it tells the story of a young boy called Brian Warner, who escaped a childhood of decorum and religion, embraced drugs and satanism, and — after a failed writing career — found his true calling in music (to torture a Clive Barker quote, writing is masturbation, while playing in a band is an orgy). Somewhere along the way he has an epiphany: there there were worse things than being rejected by the cool kids. Being accepted by the cool kids, perhaps. Like Antichrist Superstar, this book has three parts, and with the final part documenting the aforementioned album’s creation and the beginnings of nationwide controversy.

I don’t hate Manson, but I don’t pity him, either. Yes, he was subject to many defamatory attacks, and he was blamed for many things that weren’t his fault…but he has profited handsomely from the controversy, too. He sure as fuck didn’t become the most famous rockstar in America because his music was good.

The book was co-written with Neil Strauss, who is a talented writer — relentless at paring away the rind and getting straight to the interesting parts. If Strauss was a DVD player he’d skip over the movie’s opening credits, start you in the middle of the first action scene, and fast forward through all the dialogue at 3x speed. Reading his books can be exhausting because he throws so much stuff at you so quickly.

The book is full of interesting moments — Brian describes his run-ins with police, his meeting with Anton Szander LaVey, and provides some affidavits from the American Family Association that make him sound like the worst monster of the 21st century (I’m sure he appreciates this very much). I wish there had been fewer random groupie sex stories, and more about Trent Reznor. For a while it seems the working relationship between the two men is building to something big, but the expected payoff doesn’t occur.

The book finds time for lots of philosophising. The revelation Manson has is that nobody is pure, and that it’s all a charade. The Holy Hannah schoolteacher who kept softcore erotica books in her desk drawer. The much loved uncle who had a huge collection of bestiality porn. Everybody has skeletons in their closet. You will think of the verse from the Bible that talks about tombs: beautiful and whitewashed from the outside, dark and seething with corruption on the inside.

Manson has no filter. He talks shit about records labels, old bandmates, current bandmates, and, most of all, himself. His honesty is appealing. Whether he’s poking fun at Daisy Berkowitz’s stupidity (“hey, this album’s about Jesus going on a rock tour, right?”), or outlining his attempt at murdering at ex-girlfriend, he is always direct and blunt. Despite the outlandish content of Hell, it seems more trustworthy than many biographies I read. If this is the expurgated and censored version of Manson’s life, then I don’t want to know about the things that were left out. Manson has always had things to say, but usually those things dance an awkward two-step to (and with) musical accompaniment. Now, the message is unfettered and free.

Aquarium — also known as “the album your little sister used to listen to” — makes no attempt at disguising what it is. It’s not varied, or subtle, or smart. It grabs hold of a single working formula (fun danceable bubblegum pop) and spends forty minutes mugging it in a dark alley.

The songs are simple but very tightly constructed, with production as light and airy as spongecake. Lene Nystrøm’s voice has a strange but not unpleasant tonality to it, her voice sounds like that of a talented singing alien. Male vocalist René Dif exists mostly as a foil to Nystrøm’s voice. He could never carry a song on his own, but his back-and-forth exchanges with the female vocals are fun and energetic.

Aqua songs are very catchy. The melodies have a tendency of entering your head and kind of barricading themselves in there, Rorke’s Drift style — armies of Zulus may be needed to dislodge them. “Barbie Girl” is the most famous track (Blender or someone referred to it as “Scandi-Wegian pedo pop”) but “Doctor Jones” and “My Oh My” are also very good. “Be a Man” is boring, but “Turn Back Time” brings the album to a new level of class (ie, any level of class). You’d be ashamed to listen to the rest of this album in mixed company, but “Turn Back Time” sounds mature and sophisticated.

For the most part, the album is full of childish nursery-rhyme lyrics are both adorable and entertainingly creepy. There’s a fair few double-entendres here and there, no doubt an adult could fit his or her own experiences to the words.

Still, the album was clearly written with a particular age range in mind. “Heat of the Night” has Rene Dif confiding “the tequila is here” in an aren’t-I-scandalous voice. So, he brought tequila. I wonder what else he brought that we can’t tell mom and dad about. Alcoholic chocolates shaped like hearts? Stripped by Christina Aguilera…the UNCENSORED version? Plainly, shit is about to go down.

Aquarium is very embarrassing but I think it survives better today than Drake or Pitbull’s albums will in 15 years. It’s catchy, and relatively free of annoying 90s gimmicks. If you want the manly version of this album, acquire I Get Wet by Andrew WK, which is 95% the same but has loud guitars.