“None of the Suns” is the most explicitly post-punk and gothic song on One Assassination Under God – Chapter 2 . Its imagery seems almost designed for that genre: demons, blood, darkness, blackness, angels, Heaven, and the disappearance of daylight. Yet the song becomes much more interesting when those images are placed alongside Manson's own explanation of it. He has connected the song to his love of post-punk and goth music, but also to his fascination with Lewis Carroll and Carroll's relationship with nighttime. Manson has described “outrunning daylight” as a way of cheating death, which gives the night a meaning beyond gothic atmosphere. He has also cited Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit as an inspiration for the atmosphere of the song. The painting accompanying the song, which Manson calls “We're in the Black Now,” is his own image caught somewhere between day and night. That may be the most useful place to begin with the song, because the darkness here does not s...
Throughout his career, Marilyn Manson has been asked by various interviewers about things he regrets, and in lyrics of his songs he has talked about both regretting and not regretting, but the last time he was asked about his regrets was in 2019, in an interview for the German magazine Numero Homme Berlin (Spring/Summer 2019) for which he graced the cover. I translated his response below: Sina Braetz: Looking back, what do you regret most about your life? Marilyn Manson: I regret that I was naive enough to let people believe that my kindness was weakness and that I allowed them to take advantage of it. Many people believed that I was actually stupid or naive because I was so friendly and they betrayed me. But that was my fault, not theirs. That's why I regret not having been competent enough to understand that my desire to have companionable friendship - or whatever you want to call it - to have friends or family, made me make a lot of mistakes that I wish I hadn't made. Bu...