A Detailed Analysis of Marilyn Manson's "Antichrist Superstar" (Fundamentally Loathsome Part 2) скачать в хорошем качестве

A Detailed Analysis of Marilyn Manson's "Antichrist Superstar" (Fundamentally Loathsome Part 2)

Part of my goal with episode I of Fundamentally Loathsome was to lay the groundwork of Marilyn Manson's career that would be necessary for understanding Antichrist Superstar. Portrait of an American Family, while I do believe it to be an excellent, and even a perfect album, is far less ambitious than the three concept albums which followed, which altogether Manson has labeled his "triptych." Antichrist Superstar is the first third of the triptych. I shall talk about the other two albums in episodes III and IV of this series. Episode I ended up dealing somewhat sparsely with the lyrics on Portrait of an American Family, which is not what I initially intended, but it ended up serving the piece better that way, as Portrait of an American Family was such a childhood-focused album, and it fit very nicely within the format of recounting Manson's childhood and the formation of the band. I intend to do a similar treatment with most of Manson's albums following the triptych, but with the triptych itself, the concepts and themes are so intricate and perfectly woven together that each album in it warrants a full, detailed analysis of each song in its track list order. This alone was an undertaking that exceeded the length of episode I. But besides that, it was also necessary to cover the events of 1995, including Smells Like Children, which was a release so unremarkable that it didn't deserve its own video. I had initially planned on covering Smells Like Children at the end of the first episode, but I found that if I tacked it on at the end, it felt like an extremely long epilogue that didn't serve the pacing of the video. When I hit upon the idea of teasing Antichrist Superstar at the beginning, only to pivot into a 20 minute prologue about Smells Like Children, I became excited again, because I liked the idea of building up something new only to be diverted back into the familiar, deranged childhood world of the Spooky Kids, before plunging fully into the main topic. It served as a good appetizer before the main course. In my research, I knew I would have to do some serious digging into The Bible, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the occult. I did so with descending degrees of intensity. I was already familiar with the style of The Bible, so that was easy to blast through, and I ended up with a long block of research and analysis that I couldn't find a place for, and I worried that it would bloat the video, or divert the topic from Marilyn Manson too much. At one point, I imagined making episodes II and III about Antichrist Superstar, or even episode 2.1 and 2.2. But this simply wouldn't do either. At the moment where the mock-intermission happens halfway through the video, I could have split the thing into two parts, and it would have saved me on export time, but I decided not to, because this video is made as one piece, so I see no reason not to let it stand as one piece, although many content creators would opt for chopping it up. Reading Nietzsche proved much more difficult. I read The Twilight of Idols, which is the recommended text for beginners, and while I enjoyed it a great deal, I found that there was very little about the work of Nietzsche, that I could see at least, which was necessary to spotlight in my video, and yet, I'm surprised by how useful the reading (and many, many hours of lecture-watching) ended up being for understanding this album. I don't think my perspective on Antichrist Superstar would have been as well-formed as it is if I hadn't studied Nietzsche. The biggest blind spot in the video is the sparse mention of occult topics. Sure, I cover a bit about banner sigils in the Tetragrammaton, some Satanic Bible material, and a small taste of Aleister Crowley, but there is far more meat on that bone for the Mansonite who takes a greater interest in the occult than I do. Nachtkabarett.com has some good material on this topic. So the end result is a nearly four-hour video in which not a second of it is fat that might be trimmed. I take great care to be succinct and not repeat myself when I speak, and even then, the video ended up being longer than The Irishman. I think more than anything, that speaks to the brilliance of Antichrist Superstar. Four hours only covers the minimum of it. The episode title, "Astonishing Panorama of the End Times," is a song title, and I intend to title every episode after a Marilyn Manson song, preferably one that I don't cover in the video itself, just as I titled episode I "Wormboy." I intend episode III to be called "Mister Superstar," because it covers how Manson dealt with the aftermath of becoming a superstar, a topic which colors all of the themes on Mechanical Animals. I set the first half of the video to music, but then completely omitted it in the second half. This was mostly for convenience, but I ended up liking the quieter effect. I can't imagine I'll ever have to make a video this long again, and if I do, it shall be a very dismal realization indeed.