Heads or tails?

I'm a very psychosomatic person. Mental stress makes me physically tired, aches and pains stoke the flames of my, let's say it, excessively morbid sense of humor. Tonight's album review could go in two different directions, but if i'm gonna sell my soul at the crossroads of metaphor and hyperbole street, i'm also going to bore the devil with an extended analysis of how both paths are essentially the same and my perseverance along either hinges only on the mindset from which i choose to approach them.

I go through periods of loving and hating both Marilyn Manson and Social Distortion. They can be exactly what i want to hear, or they can come across as total poser hacks who i have to ignore for a while. They both wear makeup.

Marilyn Manson is essentially a protege of Trent Reznor but fails to be either metal or industrial at almost every turn, and Mike Ness can't decide if he's a greaser, or a hick, or a gangster, but he's really just a grungy version of all of them. What i'm saying is they are both potentially enjoyable and have their moments of amazing, but as franchises they might as well be the third Matrix movie: if you paid me to care, i'd say "pass."

I saw Marilyn Manson in concert for Antichrist Superstar with my friend Vinh, which means i stood in the parking lot of the state fairgrounds for an hour waiting to get overly frisked by security, yelled at by activists, squeezed like a sardine in a sea of sweaty goth kids, have my poster stolen by a 12 year old who could run surprisingly fast, and get called a heathen the next day in algebra. Fun times.

I haven't seen Social Distortion except for old video footage.

Manson is a commercialized exaggeration of my thing, he's the shock-rock imitation pancake syrup of industrial, but my palate demands actual boiled sap from a maple tree harvested in a galvanized bucket from a real forest in Canada.

Mike Ness strikes me as the Billy Idol of Rockabilly. Or like if Johnny Cash were Emo. Give me the Stray Cats or Reverend Horton Heat any day of the week.

I'm not gonna stand here and say that's fair, but  don't throw the tomatoes so hard that i can't slice them up for a sandwich later.

Musically and lyrically, both these albums are great. If this was it from either of them i'd be perfectly happy. But they aren't. The things they did before them are better. The things they did after are corporate franchise work disguised as artistic license. These are two of the very, very few albums i bought as a demographic, and i traded most of that stuff for cash to pay off my first round of credit card debt. I'm not saying that's the source of my bipolar opinion of either band, but i am saying it's real when i listen to them and sometimes i just can't ignore it.

There i go, walking across the median after punching satan in the nuts. Bonus points if you can tell me the year they were published without looking it up.

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