Marilyn Manson is more than just contemporary metal's only true star. To some, he's public enemy number one. To others, the spokesman for the Columbine generation.
Mainly, though, he's a very shrewd man.
And if Manson has never been quite the songwriter you suspect he'd like to be - the standout tracks on this career-spanning best-of are the covers of The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)", Soft Cell's northern soul lift "Tainted Love" and Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" - well, his own stuff has never sounded less than brilliant.
The former Brian Warner, music journalist, has a great line in slogans, too. He knows how the media works: they want big quotes, manifestos, headlines. So every song reads like a headline. So you get "This Is The New Shit". You get "Irresponsible Hate Anthem", "Rock Is Dead" - every last one of them a rushing, intoxicating, fist-clenching manifesto long before it's a song.
But if that's the key to his appeal as a figure, there's the lingering suspicion that it might also be the reason for the miasma of disposability about this collection of his finest individual moments.
Manson knows his music, like Tarantino knows his film. He knows Marc Almond and The Eurythmics, where one suspects contemporaries like Fred Durst would not. Mostly, the lifts are inspired. The baying crowd on "This Is The New Shit" crashes in like a bonecrushing hardhouse powerchord; the creepily disassociated vocal on "The Nobodies" is the former Spooky Kid’s menacing, off-key horrorflick nursery rhyme. The narrator of "mOBSCENE" is straight out of James Ellroy.
And that's why a Manson album's always a pleasure, a diary of what he's reading, listening to and watching at the time – "Mechanical Animals"' cokey glam, "The Golden Age of Grotesque"'s Berlin-style decadence...they're musicals, little bubbles of mood, or time, of style. And that's also why, ultimately, this Best Of is such a frustrating experience. The best bits of Manson, separated from the cumulative affect of their host albums, sound like excerpts, like snatches overheard while channel surfing; oddly vulnerable and somehow smaller than you remember.
