Manson Song Quotes

Light a candle for the sinners set the world on fire

Like I said, magic comes from life, and especially from emotions. They're a source of the same intangible energy that everyone can feel when an autumn moon rises and fills you with a sudden sense of bone-deep excitement, or when the first warm breeze of spring rushes past your face, full of the scents of life, and drowns you in a sudden flood of unreasoning joy. The passion of mighty music that brings tears to your eyes, and the raw, bubbling, infectious laughter of small children at play, the bellowing power of a stadium full of football fans shouting "Hey!" in time to that damned song—they're all charged with magic. My magic comes from the same places. And maybe from darker places than that. Fear is an emotion, too. So is rage. So is lust. And madness. I'm not a particularly good person. I'm no Charles Manson or anything, but I'm not going to be up for canonization either. Though in the past, I think maybe I was a better person than I am today. In the past I hadn't seen so many people hurt and killed and terrorized by the same kind of power that damn well should have been making the world a nicer place, or at the least staying the hell away from it. I hadn't made so many mistakes back then, so many shortsighted decisions, some of which had cost people their lives. I had been sure of myself. I had been whole.

I’ve said a million times that if more stupid people killed themselves over stupid songs, there would be less stupid people in the world.

Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity. Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.

It's hardly in a body's pow'r, To keep, at times, frae being sour.

Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand), the first single from Eat Me, Drink Me, features a video filmed by Titanic director James Cameron. In it, Manson croons to Wood, who – with bobbed hair, gloves and a demure frock – blankly masturbates in an audience of writhing lesbians, Manson’s image reflected in her heart-shaped glasses. I wanted to like the song, but found Manson’s threadbare voice and overdubbed music annoying, and the chorus - 'Don’t break my heart/and I won’t break your heart-shaped glasses' – suggested a pugilistic retribution ('Dump me, and I’ll punch your lights out!') more in keeping with Norman Mailer than Nabokov.

The "four angels" were the Beatles, whom Manson considered ""leaders, spokesmen, prophets," according to Gregg. The line "And he opened the bottomless pit...And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth; and unto them was given power..." was still another reference to the English group, Gregg said. Locusts - Beatles - one and the same. "Their faces were as the faces of men," yet "they had hair as the hair of women." An obvious reference to the long-haired musicians. Out of the mouths of the four angles "issued fire and brimstone." Gregg: "This referred to the spoken words, the lyrics of the Beatles' songs, the power that came out of their mouths.

All of the girls were forced to scavenge for food to survive. Manson had watched the young runaways of the Haight survive on what society threw away. These “Diggers” as they called themselves were always female and were forced to not only scavenge for food in dumpsters but also to prepare and serve the food to the men. Manson’s followers often resorted to having sex with supermarket and restaurant workers in exchange for food for the family. The whole family also began having group sex around this time. Manson would give his family large doses of LSD then preach to them for hours. Sometimes he would play his guitar, encouraging the family to sing along to his songs, and often these sessions would end with Manson orchestrating an orgy. Manson would be in complete control of these group sessions, even talking each member through what he wanted them to do and to whom.

A second famous person became involved with the Manson Family around the spring of 1968. Two of the Manson girls, Patricia and Ella Jo, were hitch-hiking on the Pacific Coast Highway when Beach Boy Dennis Wilson picked them up and invited them to his house. The girls complied, and after spending an afternoon with Dennis, they returned to Manson and told him about their famous new friend. Over subsequent days, Manson managed to worm his way into Dennis’ life, taking advantage of his extreme generosity to move his family into Dennis’ house. Manson also hoped that Dennis would be able to help him boost his music career, a dream Manson had never let go. But any opportunities Dennis threw Manson’s way, he squandered. It became clear to anyone with musical training that Manson could only play a few chords on his guitar and none of his songs were good enough to record. After a few months, Dennis was desperate to part ways with Manson and even moved out of his own home, leaving his landlord to deal with evicting the Manson Family.

In late 1968, Manson seized upon a new text for his prophecies: a musical training manual designed to help him create an army out of his cult—the Beatles’ 1968 album known as “the White Album.” Manson said that the Beatles had channeled his own teachings and used them to create the White Album, which he saw as a vehicle for sharing those teachings with the world. Whether Manson truly believed this fanciful idea is difficult to discern, but his starving, acid-frazzled followers believed it wholeheartedly. According to Manson, the White Album expressed the Beatles’ need for a spiritual savior and contained coded messages explicitly directed at him. Manson was, he believed, the savior the Beatles were looking for. Manson also used the coincidence of the Beatle’s song “Sexy Sadie,” his nickname for follower Susan Atkins, to prove his point and focused on the lyrics of “Piggies,” a song about class struggle, assuring his followers that they were the piggies the Beatles were writing about.

According to Manson, America was on the brink of an apocalyptic race war. In the summer of 1969, Manson said, the black population of America was going to unite and rise up in arms against the white population. The Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” was named after a rollercoaster in England, yet Manson assured his followers that it was, in fact, named after the coming race war. Once the race war began, Manson said, he and his followers would retire to the desert. There, in Death Valley, the family would find an underground city where they could escape the war and wait for the Beatles to join them. Manson taught his followers that although the black population would easily overpower the white population in war, once the planet belonged to them, they wouldn’t know how to sustain it. At this point, the Manson Family could emerge from their underground kingdom, enslave the black population, and become the rulers of the world. Of course, re-populating the earth after Helter Skelter would be of paramount importance, and Manson taught the women in his family that his complete control over who they had sex with and when was all part of this master plan.

complement the first. The initial credit line Junior offered for investing in artists was only $100 million, much less than what had been available at Warner, but Morris could see that, sitting on a limitless tap of booze money, there was a lot more where that came from.4 Best of all, Seagram was domiciled in Canada, where the lyrics of popular rap songs were not a pressing political issue. Although Jimmy Iovine and Doug Morris were temporarily estranged as colleagues, they remained best friends and hoped to reunite. Fuchs’ actions had stung them both, and Iovine had raised such a stink after Morris’ sacking that he was no longer permitted in the Time Warner Building. Under normal circumstances, he too would have been fired, but Iovine didn’t actually work for Warner directly—he was an equity partner in a joint venture, and the only way to get rid of him was to sell him back his shares. This was an expensive proposition, as Interscope had diversified beyond rap, signing No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Together, the two came up with a plan. Iovine, the agitator, would make himself unbearable to Fuchs, and push extreme albums like Dogg Food and Antichrist Superstar that made the provocations of The Chronic seem boring by comparison. Morris,

What determines your success isn’t, “What do you want to enjoy?” The relevant question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame. You have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns all the time. Pleasure is the easy question. And pretty much all of us have a similar answer. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain? That’s the hard question that matters, the question that will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change a perspective, a life. It’s what makes me, me, and you, you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together. For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician—a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage, playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling glory. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. For me, it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I had it all planned out. I was simply biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of energy and effort into getting out there and making my mark. First I needed to finish school. Then I needed to make some extra money to buy gear. Then I needed to find enough free time to practice. Then I had to network and plan my first project. Then . . . and then nothing.