There is a point in One Assassination Under God – Chapter 2 where the language of survival finally becomes the language of retaliation. “The Arsonist” is that point. The song is not simply about having survived an attempt to destroy you. It is about what happens afterward, when the person who has been burned decides that the fire did not finish him and that the scars it left behind have become part of his strength. Manson himself described the song as the moment when the narrative of the two chapters “crystallizes into a battle stance,” and, referring to the painting he created for it, said that the “burned scar tissue” had formed into armor. That description gets very close to the heart of the song. The fire has not disappeared. It has changed him. The title is important because Manson does not call the song The Survivor or The Victim . He calls it "The Arsonist." An arsonist deliberately starts a fire, and this changes the entire perspective of the song. The speaker is no...
Marilyn Manson in Berlin: In a Dark World of Show, Hate and Pain After an abuse scandal, Marilyn Manson had withdrawn from the public eye. Now he is back in Berlin for the first time in seven years. He has brought a clear message with him to the sold-out Columbiahalle. By Dennis Sand February 17, 2025 Last week, the self-proclaimed Antichrist landed in a world that corresponds to him, or at least his philosophy, in a frightening way. The day on which Marilyn Manson performs on German soil for the first time in seven long years is the day on which the most powerful of the powerful renounce the old world order and two people lose their lives in a terrorist attack, all just a few kilometers away from the Zenith in Munich, where Manson celebrated his comeback on Thursday for, well, you could say, his comeback. Marilyn Manson is on tour again and he travels a world that continues to be in rapid decay with its moral, cultural and civil abysses. A decay that has always been reflec...