America's most NIGHTMARE

To put it in a completely cynical light, the Columbine shootings were exactly what Marilyn Manson needed. By the turn of the century, Manson was no longer America’s demon dog. White trash superstar Eminem had clocked his position and supplanted him.

Mechanical Animals wasn’t exactly a stiff – it may not have been his best album but it definitely had some of his best songs – but the kids who’d bought Antichrist Superstar in their millions were expressing their disappointment at the record store tills and in the half-empty venues he played on the subsequent tour. For Manson, that hardly mattered; he had joined that new aristocracy of the global mediaocracy. He was a celebrity and his fame had started to outshine that for which he was actually famous.

Manson had always been adept at using icons – serial killers, movie stars – for his own purposes, juxtaposing them and playing with the imagery. Now he was an icon in his own right. And as with any iconic figure, they are defined as much by those who hate them as by those who worship them.

In the wake of the’99 high school shootings in Columbine, Colorado, when students Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a gun rampage leaving 12 students and a teacher dead, Manson became a national