Marilyn Manson was the featured guest on the season premiere of "The Henry Rollins Show" on the Independent Film Channel (IFC) on Friday, April 13. The following is a trasnscript of the interview, courtesy of MansonUSA.com:
Henry Rollins: Were you off music for awhile?
Marilyn Manson: It was a strange period. I pulled a Ziggy Stardust moment where I wanted to quit music. I didn't have an interest doing it anymore because I felt the music industry had gotten to a point where I just felt completely unfulfilled, uninterested. It just seemed very objectified, very much a product, very much a cliché of what someone's supposed to feel. But I just didn't really feel inspired to do it and then I sunk into a weird black hole of, I really didn't know what I wanted to do and I lost an identity, like I didn't know who I was, because I didn't really have anything, because I've always identified myself personally by what I do and my greatest fear has always been not being able to create and I almost got to that point. I got to that point for a couple months where I don't think I've ever been that lost and different things changed, different people in my life changed, things moved around and I wrote one song and then it became maybe the fastest record I ever worked on.
This is the record I was always meant to make that I never did before. I'm not sure if this record is very American specifically. It's probably the most autobiographical. The center point is about wanting to find a connection. It's the ultimate desire to feel like you're a part of something, that you matter. The whole thing is about wanting to be, to feel a part of something. So in that sense it's very comprehensive of my whole life if I have to look at it objectively. I don't think it's me looking at the rest of the world anymore. It's me saying stuff about myself I would be maybe too embarrassed or too self-conscious to say. It will really take people back a step. It's very rock and roll. It's very un-technological. It sounds very back to music.
After surviving Columbine I went over the hill of what you can tolerate because that was the worst. Hollywood and people were giving me dirty looks like I did something wrong like, "What the fuck? What are you doing?" I just learned to deal with it. I had to move out of L.A. I moved to Chatsworth. I didn't do any press. I refused to. I got offers from everyone and then when Michael Moore interviewed me. It doesn't really show it in "Bowling for Columbine" but I had been, I came back to Denver for the first time since then where I was in Ozzfest at Mile High Stadium. We had hundreds, hundreds of death threats so I'm thinking, if I'm going to die it's going to be today because it's Mile High Stadium, they're not going to be able to stop it if someone wants to shoot so when I went onstage I just had to decide, I can't live without doing what I do so I have to accept the fact I'm going to die for it if its going to be today and…it was a great show. Obviously I didn't die. But when I did that interview, there wasn't a name for the documentary, it wasn't really there. I talked to him for about 2 1/2 hours and a lot of stuff that he went to say on the second half of the documentary was stuff I said to him but it opened a window that reintroduced me to the world in a way that people hadn't really understood me before.
If I got paid for every time someone came up to me in an airport or anywhere saying "I saw you in 'Bowling for Columbine'," the most common thing I get is, "I didn't know you're so intelligent." And I'm like, "I didn't know you're so fucking stupid but I don't know you, you know, so…" It's a backhanded compliment.
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