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With his grotesque corpse paint, gangly limbs and rasping voice, rocker Marilyn Manson gives parents nightmares and their kids a rallying point to express angst and anger. As a band, Marilyn Manson employs grinding industrial rock, highly theatrical stage shows and cutting-edge avante garde videos to get across their post-apocalyptic world view. Like so many other freak shows, the band was formed in the Florida city of Ft. Lauderdale. They caught local attention with their ambitious and provocative live shows that owed as much to Victorian burlesque as to traditional rock. The band members drove the point home by taking their first name from a famous pop star and their last name from a famous serial killers. Thus Twiggy Ramirez, Madonna Wayne Gacy and Ginger Fish got together with Brian Warner ne Marilyn. At their peak, Marilyn Manson were the go-to scape goats for any national controversy-from the Columbine high school shootings to the Republican party's Family Values campagne, Manson and the boys were held up as examples of dangerous, corrupting influences. But as is usually the case, labeling the band forbidden fruit only made them more attractive and their early albums Portrait Of An American Family and the Smells Like Children EP both sold surprisingly well. To add fuel to the fire, Manson had himself ordained as a minister in the Church of Satan. On 1998's Mechanical Animals, Marilyn Manson and crew left the industrial "shock rock" behind and glammed it up on some of their most mainstream hits-singles like "Dope Show" and "I Don't Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)" owed as much to David Bowie as Nine Inch Nails.

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