Beyond the Backlash: Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, and Metal's Changing Audience

I. The Backlash: When Social Media Becomes the Story

When Slipknot announced their 2027 (sic)est Stadium Tour, with Marilyn Manson opening the Wembley Stadium show and joining them for the South American dates, including The Town in São Paulo, the reaction was almost immediate. Thousands of comments appeared beneath the announcement, many from people saying they would no longer attend. Some described the decision as disappointing, others said they would not spend money on a concert that included Manson, and some presented the booking as a betrayal of what they believed Slipknot represented. The reaction was real, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. What interests me, however, is what happens after that initial reaction: how it is collected, amplified, repeated by music publications, and gradually transformed from a collection of individual responses into something that can begin to look like a universal verdict from “the fans.”

The current coverage makes that process fairly easy to see. NME reported thousands of comments beneath Slipknot's announcement, including people saying that Manson's involvement would prevent them from buying tickets. At the same time, the publication also reported positive reactions, including people pointing to the “huge fanbase overlap” between Slipknot and Manson and describing Manson as a “perfect support act.” The negative reaction is therefore not imaginary, but neither is it the only reaction. What happens on social media is that the strongest responses tend to become the most visible ones, and journalists know that an angry comment is more likely to attract attention than someone simply saying that they are looking forward to a concert.

This is something I have watched happen around Marilyn Manson several times since 2021. A post appears, thousands of people respond, a handful of comments are selected because they express the strongest reaction, another publication reports those comments, and then that second publication becomes evidence for the first. Eventually the original social-media comments have been transformed into a much larger narrative about “fans,” as though an Instagram comment section were a survey of the entire audience. It isn't. Social media is very good at showing us what people are willing to say publicly and much less useful for telling us what the silent part of an audience actually thinks or intends to do. Someone who is furious may write ten comments. Someone who is perfectly happy with a concert announcement may simply buy a ticket.

That does not make the criticism meaningless. There are people who have genuine moral objections to Manson appearing on a major stadium bill, and some have explicitly said that they will not attend because of those objections. The Independent reported fans calling for a boycott, including one person who said there was nothing that could be done to get their money into Manson's pockets. Those statements should not be dismissed simply because they appear on social media. But there is a difference between documenting a boycott and demonstrating its scale. At this point, we have statements of intention. We do not yet know how many people will actually change their purchasing decisions, how many will buy tickets anyway, or how many people who object to Manson will simply decide that seeing Slipknot is more important to them than the objection.

The same distinction applies to the word “backlash.” There is clearly a backlash. The question is how large it actually is and what effect it will have. Online outrage can be enormous without producing a corresponding change in behavior. Conversely, people can quietly decide not to attend a show without ever announcing their decision on X, Instagram, Facebook or anywhere else. The two groups are almost impossible to measure from a comment section.

The Guardian opinion piece by Matt Mills approaches the subject from a different direction. Mills remembers discovering metal as a teenager and describes the genre as a place that historically welcomed outsiders and misfits. He argues that Manson's appearance on the Slipknot tour is difficult to reconcile with that tradition, concluding that metal's “inclusive messaging” now feels “hollow.” That is an argument worth taking seriously because it is about the culture surrounding the music rather than simply about whether Manson is personally liked. But it remains an argument, not a measurement of what the entire metal community believes.

There is also some history here that gets lost when the current controversy is treated as though Slipknot and Manson have suddenly been placed together for the first time. They already toured together in North America in 2016, along with Of Mice & Men. Slipknot and Manson were therefore already part of the same touring world long before the present controversy. The circumstances surrounding Manson are obviously very different now. The allegations emerged publicly in 2021, and the cultural conversation surrounding him has changed considerably since then. But the pairing itself is not new.

The legal situation also needs to be described carefully. In January 2025, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office announced that criminal charges would not be filed after a four-year investigation into allegations of domestic violence and sexual assault. The DA said that the domestic-violence allegations fell outside the statute of limitations and that prosecutors could not prove sexual-assault charges beyond a reasonable doubt. Manson has further always denied the allegations. That, however, was not the end of the legal story. In January 2026, a Los Angeles judge revived a civil lawsuit brought by former assistant Ashley Walters under a new California law allowing certain older sexual assault claims to proceed. The case is scheduled for trial in November 2027. Bianca Allaine Kyne also filed a sexual assault lawsuit against him in New York, alleging incidents dating from the 1990s. Although portions of Kyne's original allegations were dismissed or required to be amended, the case itself has continued, with further court proceedings scheduled in the coming months.

So it would be inaccurate to describe the entire legal controversy as having simply disappeared or been “cleared up.” The criminal investigation ended without charges, while two separate civil cases remain active. Allegations, criminal charges, civil lawsuits, settlements, dismissals, statutes of limitation and findings in court are not interchangeable. Neither is the absence of criminal charges the same thing as a judicial finding that every allegation was false. These distinctions do not tell anyone what moral position they must take, but they do matter if we are going to discuss the controversy accurately.

Manson's continuing career also complicates the picture. He has not disappeared. He has continued to tour internationally and to draw audiences large enough for promoters to keep booking him. That does not prove that everyone has forgiven him, nor does it invalidate anyone's decision not to attend. It demonstrates something simpler: there remains an audience for Marilyn Manson that exists outside the people arguing about him online.

This is why the language of “boycott” is interesting. A boycott can be completely genuine even if it never becomes large enough to have a measurable financial effect. Someone can decide that they will not buy a ticket because Manson is on the bill, and that decision has meaning whether ten people make it or ten thousand. But the word can also acquire a much larger meaning online, where hundreds or thousands of comments can create the impression that an event itself is in danger. We should wait and see what actually happens. Wembley is scheduled for July 2027, and The Town takes place in September 2027. There is a considerable distance between an angry comment today and a measurable effect on attendance next year, especially if it turns out the two remaining lawsuits are either dismissed or settled by then.

The more interesting question, then, is not whether there is backlash. There clearly is, and there has been since 2021. It is whether the backlash being presented to us is representative of the audience that will actually be standing in those stadiums.

II. A Different Generation of Metal Fans

This is probably the part of the discussion that is most interesting. Slipknot's audience in 2026 is not necessarily the same audience that bought tickets to see them twenty or even ten years ago. A considerable number of younger listeners have discovered the band without having experienced the culture in which Slipknot originally emerged. They have encountered the music through streaming, TikTok, YouTube and social media, where individual songs can acquire meanings that have very little to do with the context in which they were originally released.

There is an excellent example of this in The Guardian's 2023 report on the younger Slipknot audience. The article described Gen Z fans, particularly young women, using “Custer” on TikTok and turning a song associated with aggression and alienation into something that could function as an expression of femininity and personal freedom. One 24-year-old fan said the trend showed that “music is for everyone,” while another said that younger fans wanted to help create a more “welcoming community.” The article also noted that Slipknot, once associated largely with a particular male nu-metal demographic, had become popular with Gen Z listeners of many different backgrounds.

That does not mean that younger Slipknot fans are all politically identical, or that they all approach allegations against musicians in the same way. It would be just as simplistic to replace one stereotype with another and assume that every younger listener is automatically more “woke” or more inclined toward cancellation. What we can say is that many younger listeners have grown up in an environment in which conversations about abuse, consent, public accountability, celebrity culture and the relationship between an artist and an audience take place constantly and publicly. They are accustomed to examining the behavior of musicians alongside their music in a way that was not necessarily part of the culture when Slipknot first became successful.

That creates an interesting generational tension around a band whose original appeal was built partly upon rejecting expectations. The older idea of rebellion in heavy music often involved refusing to conform, refusing respectability and deliberately embracing things that mainstream culture found offensive ("sex, drugs and rock and roll"). Marilyn Manson was one of the clearest expressions of that rock star tradition. His entire public identity was constructed around the idea that the outsider could become more powerful by refusing to behave according to conventional standards.

But younger listeners have inherited the music without necessarily inheriting the same rules of rebellion. For some of them, refusing to tolerate abusive behavior is itself an act of rebellion. The question is no longer simply, “Why should society tell us what we can listen to?” It can also be, “Why should an artist be protected from scrutiny simply because he is an artist?” That is a genuine cultural change, and I think it helps explain some of the intensity of the present reaction.

At the same time, there is an irony in treating Slipknot as though its audience were one fixed community with one set of values. The band's history has always involved contradictions. It was music for people who felt alienated, angry, rejected or misunderstood, but the people who found that music did not all experience alienation in the same way. The audience has changed repeatedly. The TikTok phenomenon is simply another stage in that process. Young women who were once told that they did not look like metal fans are now using Slipknot to challenge that stereotype. The community surrounding the band is not culturally frozen in 1999, 2005 or 2016.

That also means that Manson has become larger than the specific booking itself. He is now a symbol in a much wider argument about what happens when an artist accused of serious misconduct returns to public life. The question is no longer confined to whether someone likes Marilyn Manson's music. It becomes a question about whether a musician who has faced serious allegations should continue to receive major platforms, whether the passage of time changes that question, whether allegations should permanently determine someone's professional future, and who gets to make that decision—the audience, the promoter, the venue, the courts, or the artist himself.

Those questions cannot be answered by an Instagram comment section. They also cannot be answered simply by pointing to a successful concert. A successful show does not demonstrate that everyone has forgiven an artist, just as a boycott campaign does not demonstrate that an entire audience has rejected him.

This is where the history of Manson and Slipknot becomes relevant again. In 2016, a Slipknot fan could see both artists on the same tour without having to negotiate the questions that surround the 2027 shows. Now the same pairing arrives after five years of public accusations, legal proceedings, documentaries, campaigns and arguments about whether Manson should be allowed to return. The music may be similar, but the cultural context is not.

That difference is particularly important for younger fans who may have discovered Slipknot years after the band first became famous. Someone who was twelve years old when the allegations against Manson became public may have encountered Slipknot through TikTok before ever encountering the older culture of shock rock that surrounded Manson in the 1990s and 2000s. Their relationship with the band may therefore have little to do with the rebellion that an older generation remembers. They may simply hear the music differently.

That does not make one generation right and the other wrong. It means that the same band can occupy very different places in the minds of different listeners.

And this is why I think the Guardian article's larger argument is more complicated than simply asking whether metal has forgotten its values. Whose metal are we talking about? The people who discovered it through magazines and festivals? The people who saw Slipknot with Manson in 2016? The young women discovering “Custer” through TikTok? The people buying stadium tickets in 2027? These are overlapping audiences, but they are not necessarily identical.

The people most motivated to comment are not necessarily the people most motivated to attend. The people who feel strongly enough to boycott may be perfectly sincere, but there are also people who will never post a comment because they have already made their decision privately. The only way to know how large each group really is will be to watch what happens when tickets go on sale and, eventually, when those stadiums actually fill.

III. Beyond the Comment Section: The Town and the Audience

The reaction in Brazil makes the same point from a slightly different angle. When The Town announced that Marilyn Manson would perform on the same date as Slipknot in São Paulo, Brazilian media immediately reported criticism on social media. CNN Brasil and Estadão both focused on the reaction and the questions surrounding the festival's decision. But the Brazilian coverage also did something that some of the British commentary has not done to the same extent: it went directly to the festival and asked why Manson had been booked.

The Town's response is worth considering in full because it shows exactly how the festival itself has chosen to frame the decision:

“The Town repudiates any manifestation of violence, aggression, and harassment, whatever its nature, and believes that it is the responsibility of the competent authorities to evaluate the allegations and determine the responsibilities of any person involved.

The show at the festival is part of Slipknot’s world tour, which also includes the participation of Marilyn Manson at the show in London, England, and in different countries in Latin America.

At The Town, Marilyn Manson will perform on the same date as Slipknot, forming part of the programming for that day, which promises to be one of the best moments of metal at the festival.”

The statement does not attempt to settle the allegations itself. It establishes the festival's position that violence, aggression and harassment are repudiated, while leaving responsibility for evaluating the allegations to the competent authorities. It also emphasizes that Manson is not being brought to São Paulo as an isolated booking, but as part of the Slipknot world tour, including the Wembley show and the South American dates.

Zé Ricardo, the artistic vice-president of Rock World, which operates The Town and Rock in Rio, went further in comments reported by Folha de S.Paulo and O Globo. His explanation is worth hearing in his own words rather than reducing it to a general statement about the festival's position. Explaining why Manson was included, he said, “He is a very good artist, whom we like very much and who comes together with Slipknot as part of their tour package.” He then addressed the allegations directly: “He is a guy who has not been convicted, there is nothing proven.” Ricardo acknowledged that the allegations were inconsistent with the values of the company, saying, “These are stories that absolutely are not part of anything that we believe in, but at this moment he is an artist who will be touring around the world.”

Ricardo explained that Rock World has previously refused to bring artists because of concrete circumstances in their histories. “Now, it has to be something concrete, because there are things that aren't,” he said. “We have already stopped bringing artists because there were concrete things—in which he was judged, convicted, and that carries weight in his history. But we also cannot pre-condemn a person without proof.” In his separate comments to O Globo, he described Manson as “a controversial artist, but very talented,” adding that “the fact that he has not been convicted weighs heavily on this. So we are approaching it with that thinking.”

That is the festival's stated reasoning. It does not mean that everyone has to accept it. Someone can believe that the allegations themselves are sufficient reason not to attend, regardless of whether there was a criminal conviction. Someone else can believe that a festival should distinguish between allegations and conduct established through a judicial process. The important point is that The Town was asked to explain its decision, and its artistic vice-president actually did so.

Ricardo was also asked about criticism and the possibility of a boycott, and his answer goes directly to the question of how much weight should be given to social media reaction:

“We are very confident in what we do, in our lineup. The opinion of our audience is very important, but it is not really possible to take everything that is said on social media into consideration.”

He continued:

“Social media has things of love, but also short-sighted views of what we present as a festival.”

To illustrate his point, Ricardo referred to the most recent Rock in Rio:

“You sell 680,000 tickets [at the last Rock in Rio] and people say that it was empty.”

He was not claiming that criticism does not exist. He was making a different argument: that social media is not necessarily a reliable measurement of the audience as a whole.

Ricardo also placed the decision within the larger economics of the festival business. He argued that festivals around the world are competing with stadium and arena tours, and that one of Rock World's advantages is the strength of its festival brands. Speaking about The Town, he said:

“The Town brand, even though it is new, is already so strong and so coveted that we have artists like Slipknot giving up doing an arena tour to come and play at the festival.”

He compared this with Elton John:

“We run up against that, but it was the same with Elton John. He could have done a stadium, but he preferred to come to Rock in Rio.”

Finally, Ricardo compared reactions to festival lineups with the way football supporters respond to their teams:

“It's passion. The guy thinks the lineup had to be made for him. If there is an artist he doesn't like, he already says, ‘Uhhh.’”

And then:

“The people who send us love are thousands, and the people who complain, in the end, also go, buy the ticket. So, it shows their passion for the event.”

That last statement is particularly relevant to the larger question of social media backlash. Ricardo is arguing that criticism and behavior are not necessarily the same thing. Someone can complain about an artist online and still attend the concert. Someone else can refuse to attend without saying anything publicly. Another person can be enthusiastic about the lineup from the beginning. Until tickets are sold and the audience actually arrives, none of those groups can be measured simply by counting comments.

The contrast between the coverage is therefore interesting. In Britain, much of the immediate coverage has been framed around backlash, disappointment and the possibility of a boycott. In Brazil, the reaction has also been reported as backlash, but the coverage has placed greater emphasis on asking the festival to explain its decision and publishing the festival's answer. Spanish-language coverage has similarly reported the anger while acknowledging that Manson continues to tour and that the reaction is not universally negative. None of this means that one country's audience is more accepting than another's. It simply demonstrates how the same event can become a slightly different story depending on which media environment is reporting it.

And perhaps that is the larger issue here. We are now watching a controversy develop in real time through a media system in which journalists, fans, promoters and artists are all looking at the same social media feeds. A journalist sees angry comments and writes about the backlash. Other journalists see that article and report that there is backlash, but give it a new appealing title. Fans then see those reports and respond to them, creating even more comments. The cycle continues until the existence of backlash becomes news in itself.

There is nothing inherently dishonest about reporting that people are angry. The problem begins when the existence of anger is quietly transformed into a measurement of the entire audience.

The same problem applies to the opposite conclusion. A successful Manson concert with a sold-out audience of 20,000 people does not prove that everyone has forgiven him, just as a thousand angry Instagram comments do not prove that everyone has rejected him. A sold-out show tells us that enough people wanted to attend that particular show. A boycott campaign tells us that some people do not want to attend. Neither tells us everything about the audience.

That is why I think the most interesting part of this controversy is not actually whether Marilyn Manson should be on the Slipknot tour. People have already made up their minds about that, and they are entitled to do so. The more interesting question is what happens when an artist becomes a symbol for an argument that is much larger than the artist himself.

Manson now occupies that position. To some people he represents an artist who should never have been given another major platform. To others he represents the return of an artist who was not criminally charged after the Los Angeles investigation. To still others, he is simply a musician whose music they want to see performed. The revived Walters lawsuit adds another layer to the story because the legal process surrounding one of the allegations is still continuing. These positions exist simultaneously, and an Instagram comment section cannot tell us how large each group actually is.

The Guardian piece asks whether metal has forgotten its commitment to outsiders and the downtrodden. That is a legitimate question. But there is another side to the history of heavy metal that should not be forgotten either: metal has always been full of contradictions. It has been rebellious and commercial, inclusive and tribal, hostile to authority while creating its own rules about who belongs. Marilyn Manson's career has lived inside those contradictions for decades. Slipknot's career has too.

The 2027 tour will therefore tell us something that the current social media reaction cannot. We will see how many people actually buy tickets, how many decide not to, how the shows are received, and whether the controversy remains as intense once the announcement is no longer new. Until then, I think it is worth resisting the temptation to turn a comment section into a census of Slipknot fans or to treat every angry post as evidence that an entire generation has reached the same conclusion.

There is a real backlash. There are real people who are offended by the decision, and some will undoubtedly refuse to attend because of it. That should be acknowledged. But there are also people who will attend, people who are excited about the lineup, people who have no interest in the controversy, and people who will make their own decision without announcing it online. The existence of those people is just as real, even if they produce fewer headlines.

Perhaps that is what makes this controversy worth watching. It is not only about Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Wembley, or The Town. It is about how a new generation of fans negotiates the relationship between music, morality, rebellion, accusation, accountability and the artist. It is about whether the older idea that music can exist separately from the person who creates it still carries the same weight. And it is about what happens when social media gives us an almost continuous stream of public opinion while the actual audience remains largely invisible until it buys a ticket, walks through the gates and stands in front of the stage.

For now, the comments are making noise. The rest of the story is yet to come.

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