Eat Me, Drink Me
- Release date: June 5, 2007
- Genre: Rock
- Length: 52:22
- Label: Interscope
- Written by: Marilyn Manson, Tim Skold
Track List
| Lyrics | Music | |
|---|---|---|
| Marilyn Manson | Tim Skold | |
| If I Was Your Vampire | X | X |
| Putting Holes in Happiness | X | X |
| The Red Carpet Grave | X | X |
| They Said That Hell's Not Hot | X | X |
| Just A Car Crush Away | X | X |
| Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart guides the Hand) | X | X |
| Evidence | X | X |
| Are You the Rabbit? | X | X |
| Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery | X | X |
| You and Me and the Devil Makes 3 | X | X |
| EAT ME, DRINK ME | X | X |
Introduction
Manson wrote Eat Me, Drink Me as a way to cope with everything that happened to him in the year preceding it: his marriage and divorce from Burlesque performer Dita Von Teese, his new romance with the much younger than him actress Evan Rachel Wood, the disruption of his self-identity as an artist, and sinking into a pit of depression. All of that together combined to form a record which at the time stood out for the fact that it wasn't about Manson exploring a topic like organized religion (Antichrist Superstar), Hollywood and stardom (Mechanical Animals), politics and the Columbine shootings (Holy Wood), or art (The Golden Age of Grotesque). This time, he was exploring himself.
This album is all about love, vulnerability, hurt, and seeing himself as broken and doomed. It's very much a psychological snapshot of who he was at the time of the recording, and this section gives the necessary personal background that is needed to place the contents of the album in proper context.
Dita Von Teese
Dita Von Teese is a Brulesque performer who started dating Manson in 2001 during the Holy Wood era. They got engaged in 2004 towards the end of the Golden Age of Grotesque era and married in November of 2005. To the outside world it looked like a successful relationship. They seemed happy when they did interviews together, they collaborated artistically (she appeared in all of his Golden Age music videos), and her career was boosted significantly from being associated with Manson. Yet behind closed doors things were starting to sour.
Dita began to have expectations of Manson to rein down his Rockstar lifestyle and become more mature, responsible, and conservative. These expectations made him feel judged ("I was starting to feel like being Marilyn Manson wasn't a good thing to be"), and he began to feel guilty for working and for not being able to follow her into the explosion of her career like she did for him.
Although he wanted to accommodate her wishes, ultimately what she was asking him to do is separate who he was in his personal life from who he was in his professional life, and for Manson there was no such distinction. The only way he was able to do it was by giving up his artistic identity, but this only made him feel aimless and depressed. He had lost all interest in making music, and when the Golden Age era ended instead of starting a new musical project, he released a greatest hits compilation and went into hiatus from music. During that time, he delved into other forms of art (like painting and directing), which in retrospect he recognized was a way for him to run away from himself.
As their wedding day drew near, Dita already had significant doubts about getting married, but she felt pressured to go through with the ceremony because "there was so much riding on it, like Vogue was photographing it, it was in a castle, it was this theater...". In retrospect, she recognized that getting married was the final nail in the coffin for their relationship. She filed for divorce one year after the marriage, citing irrevocable differences.
Evan Rachel Wood
Evan Rachel Wood is an actress who Manson befriended via his work on his directorial debut "Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll". While Dita was disapproving of Manson's lifestyle, Evan was supportive of it. She had the ability to embrace his darker sides as if they were actually redeeming qualities, and for Manson there was deep validation in that. He also saw in Evan a lot of his own qualities and seeing himself from the outside in such a way made him realize that he wasn't so bad after all. When his marriage came to an end, the two started officially dating. Evan was therefore a contrast to his other relationship, and through that contributed a lot to the album.
Coming out of a creative winter
The fallout from his marriage left Manson unable to write music. This meant that no proper effort to work on the next record had been made, and no such effort was in sight. In the meantime, Tim Skold, the band's bass player, started writing music of his own volition, inspired by whatever was going on in Manson's life at the time. This approach proved to be successful, because when Manson started to come out of his creative winter, he liked the result a lot and didn't feel like he wanted to change much about it.
Manson's first step back into being creative was when he wrote "Just A Car Crash Away". It was the kind of song that could only happen once you reach deep inside yourself and allow whatever you find in there to just come out without much of a filter. On the heels of that success, "If I Was Your Vampire" was written next, and that was the song that made Manson realize that what he was now doing could turn into a record. Having passed that barrier, the rest of the songs fell into place very quickly, and it became one of the quickest records he had ever written.
Consumption
At the time of writing the record, Manson found himself struggling with the idea that he was a product being consumed, and also that romance is total consumption. To him, this was the definition of romance: to be completely consumed by something. This attitude is reflected in his attraction to the vampire mythology (the vampire drinks the blood of another person), and in lyrics such as the song "Just A Car Crash Away" where he describes love as a fire that consumes all.
Love-as-consumption is a rather dysfunctional view of love. It's either an overcompensation for intimacy starvation or rooted in feeling defenseless against its power over you (or seemingly both, in Manson's case), and is a big part of what makes this album interesting. In many ways this album was Manson's attempt to work this out and growing past it towards a more balanced conception of what love should be, and a few years later when talking about the album in contrast to his follow up The High End of Low, Manson said that on Eat Me, Drink Me he was in the throes of a Shakespearean idealization of love, and that he didn't look at love this way anymore.
The theme of consumption is also present in the album's title, which was inspired by a real-life story about a German man (Armin Meiwes) who posted an ad looking for someone willing to be eaten. He actually found a willing volunteer, one Bernd Jurgen Armando Brandes, and carried out his wish, killing and then eating Brandes over the course of 10 months. In an interview, Manson said that "Although I can't relate to the relationship those two had, I found the story very compelling in a romantic way. I think a lot of people wouldn't look at it as romantic, but it was to them in some sick way, and it is to me in some sick way, too".
The album title is also a good example of Manson's skill at coming up with multivalent concepts. Aside from being inspired by the famous German cannibal, it's also an obvious Alice in Wonderland reference, which is a story that is driven by the protagonist's consumption of various foods and drinks, some of which literally labelled 'eat me' and 'drink me'. It also ties in with the vampirism theme, given that vampires literally consume other people's blood.
Cars
There are many car metaphors in this album. Manson's fascination with car metaphors wasn't exactly new by then, as he was already using car metaphors since his first album, but in Eat Me, Drink Me it's literally a central motif. This can be attributed to the fact that the movies Lolita and Bonnie and Clyde were key sources of inspiration for him, and as he himself put it in an interview, these are movies that "operate through a car". In the same interview, Manson also cited True Romance and Badlands as movies that happen through a car, both of which are about partners-in-crime lovers. These stories epitomize the phrase "Together as one, against all others", which Manson said is what he thinks love should be. This phrase is not found in the lyrics themselves, but it makes an appearance in the music video for the song "Heart Shaped Glasses", and his follow up record.
Alice in Wonderland
Victorian England. A haunted writer in an isolated castle is tormented by sleepless nights and visions of a girl named Alice, following the death of his father in 1869. He finds himself becoming a symptom of his own invention.
"Now all my nightmares know my name."
He is Lewis Carroll. Terrified of what waits for him each night.
During the events that inspired the album, Manson was working on his first film called Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll. It was meant to be an Alice in Wonderland themed psychological horror film about the life of Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Manson co-wrote the script with Anthony Silva, and was supposed to both direct it and star in it in the role of Lewis Carroll.
As a result of it being a major point of attention for Manson, there are multiple Alice in Wonderland references in the album itself, such as the songs "EAT ME, DRINK ME" and "Are You The Rabbit?". On the tour, one of the visual theatrics was Manson standing on a huge chair, a reference to Alice shrinking in size in the first Wonderland novel.
Song Analysis
Manson said on some occasions that he didn't want the album to be interpreted as if it was about Dita. To him, the proper way to view it is not in terms of 'this is a song about person X', but rather 'this is how I feel'. Nevertheless, it would be naïve to assume that songs that fit with his experience with Dita were not inspired by those experiences, so I'm going to point out the connections where I see them. Similarly, while some songs were officially confirmed to be inspired by Evan, it's possible that other songs drew some direct or indirect inspiration from his relationship with her as well, and I'm going to point that out if I believe that to be the case.
If I Was Your Vampire
In an interview with Revolver magazine, Manson described the song as
the centerpiece of the album. I woke up Christmas Day and wrote it. It's kind of my death wish fantasy.
The fantasy depicted in the song is the darkly romantic idea of two lovers dying together to spend eternity in death. It was inspired by something (presumably) Evan said one day when Manson was in a depressive mood:
On Christmas I was inspired by the whole new relationship that was developing in my life, and saying, 'I believe in you, and I believe in the fact that you and I are the same. That I'll die, if you wanna die.' And at that point you don't want to die anymore, you've found somebody else who is like you, so I think at that point, the record became a record, and my life became worth living.
The general story of the song is something like this: his lover lets him kill her to join him in undeath. He stabs her in the heart in the middle of lovemaking, and they become vampire lovers, sharing a grave together. But then, circumstances that aren't explained in the song, lead them to commit suicide together by driving off a cliff. It sounds somewhat haphazard if you look at it only in terms of plot, but it's very coherent if you look at it as an amalgam of emotional cravings:
The first craving is to have someone join him in his darkness. The song utilizes vampiric imagery because it's a persona that encapsulated a lot of what Manson came to believe about himself with regards to relationships. It's a cursed creature, a nocturnal creature, but also one who owns his darkness, and that's exactly what Manson wanted to do having been convinced by his former wife's criticism that he wasn't a good, stable person. It's also darkly romantic, a seducer, one who lusts so passionately that he devours another person. Vampiric romanticism is often about two lovers being damned together, two people against the rest of the world, and Manson was desperately craving a love characterized by someone willing to plunge into the abyss with him, so that he could alleviate his loneliness by sharing his desperation with another person, and escape from it by sinking into that other person, devouring them and let them devour him. So that's the "join me in undeath" part of the song. This part doesn't really represent "dying together", it represents "being with me with devotion".
The other craving in the song is something like "I see no hope for myself, and I wish for the silver lining of not facing the end alone". That's the dual suicide part in the end of the song. It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Manson wrote about something like two lovers facing the end together. On the album Mechanical Animals, the song The Speed of Pain was about two lovers finding solace in each other right before they die together, and the song The Last Day On Erath was about two lovers watching the world end together. So this is a concept that Manson was always attracted to in a romantic way.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| 6 a.m. Christmas morning. No shadows, no reflections here. Lying cheek to cheek in your cold embrace | The song opens with a slow, quiet, and eerie keyboard part that sounds like it was taken
from an old-school vampire movie. The song opens with imagery from vampiric lore (a vampire doesn't have a reflection and doesn't cast shadows). The embrace of the woman he's with is cold because she is a vampire like himself, and vampires are dead creatures. This verse is outside of the chronology of the rest of the song. It's somewhere in the middle of the story, after his lover joins him in undeath, but before they commit suicide together. |
| So soft and so tragic as a slaughterhouse. You press the knife against your heart. And say that, "I love you, so much you must kill me now." And say that, “I love you so much you must kill me now”. | You press the knife against your heart In an interview with Rolling Stone, Manson elaborated on the story that inspired the song, saying that the knife part of the lyrics is also taken from the event that inspired the song: She [a "close friend"] picked up a butcher's knife and said, 'Here, you can stab me,'" he says. "When someone was willing to drown with me, I really didn't want to drown anymore.” There was also an interview in which Manson said something along the lines of "it took meeting someone as tragic as myself to see that I wasn't that bad" (not an exact quote) when talking about Evan, so this is what I think inspired the line "so soft and so tragic". So now the stage is set; she's offering to join him in death, and unlike what happened in the real world, in the song they are going to go through with it. |
| If I was your vampire, Certain as the moon, instead of killing time, we'll have each other until the sun. If I was your vampire death waits for no one. Hold my hands across your face, because I think our time has come. | Themes of devouring each other (we'll have each other till the sun) and being doomed together
(death waits for no one; our time has come). When she agreed to join him in death, she also
agreed to be part of his impending doom, and that doom is coming for them. I think that "hold my hands across your face" means "use me as your shield against the incoming death". He is the thing that protects. |
| Digging your smile apart with my spade tongue The hole is where the heart is. We built this tomb together, and I won't fill it alone. beyond the pale everything is black no turning back. | Here Manson is mixing imagery of death with imagery of intimacy. French kissing becomes
digging her smile with his spade tongue, and "The hole is where the heart is" is an allusion
to stabbing her in the heart, like she told him to do. He transitions her to undeath in the
midst of lovemaking. So now they are doomed together, and they descended to that doom willingly (we built this tomb together), and there's no going back from it. "Beyond the pale" is an idiom that means "outside the bounds of what is acceptable". He, the vampire, is considered reprehensible. His world is dark, and she made a commitment to it that she can't walk away from. |
| If I was your vampire, Certain as the moon, instead of killing time, We'll have each other until the sun. If I was your vampire death waits for no one. Hold my hands across your face, because I think our time has come. | |
| Blood-stained sheets in the shape of your heart, this is where it starts... Blood-stained sheets in the shape of your heart, this is where it starts. This is where it will end. Here comes the moon again. | This is the post stabbing scene. The blood is drained out of her on the bed sheets where the
stabbing happened. The lyric "this is where it starts/ends" later became a self-fulfilling prophecy. From an interview published by The Aquarian: I think that period [Eat Me, Drink Me] kind of ended when it was a year later on 6 a.m. Christmas morning this year. I was sitting there with Twiggy, and I was sitting there with Evan and my other best friend Rudy, who's a magician, and just thought "I've been waiting a year to be able to say '6 a.m. Christmas morning' since I wrote the song last year" and it felt like some sort of passage, some rite of passage, and it was over. That period was over, all of it. Some for the good, some for the bad, but I don't want to repeat it. |
| 6:19 and I know I'm ready Drive me off the mountain. You'll burn, I'll eat your ashes The impossible wheels seducing our corpse | This is the first of many car imageries in the album. When asked about it in interviews,
Manson cited films such as True Romance, Bonnie and Clyde,
Lolita, and Badlands as movies that essentially function via a
car, so for Manson it's like a metaphor for an ongoing romance. Just like his relationships,
his car imagery often involves driving into disaster. In this part of the song, he's ready to die, and it's going to be a dual suicide. This is a scene Manson later recreated in the music video for the song Heart Shaped Glasses, where you can see him and Evan driving off a cliff together. The impossible wheel is a kind of unicycle that is basically just a wheel with two metal steps for the rider to stand on. It's very unstable, hard to ride, and gives the rider no control over it. The fact that something like this is seductive says a lot about the kinds of damaged relationships Manson is drawn to. |
| If I was your vampire, Certain as the moon, instead of killing time, we'll have each other until the sun. If I was your vampire death waits for no one. Hold my hands across your face, because I think our time has come. Beyond the pale everything is black no turning back. Beyond the pale everything is black No turning back. This is where it starts. This is where it will end. Here comes the moon again. |
Putting Holes in Happiness
"The night before [writing this song] I watched Bonnie and Clyde, and the song could easily be perceived as a negative comment on relationships but if you flip it and you think about that film especially the opening of that film represents where... the moment before Bonnie and Clyde died that they took this photograph sort of in the joy of their chaos, and that's what really inspired me so it can sound as easy as it's about some bitter memory of a relationship gone bad but it's really a bit of guilt for a relationship gone good".
Manson on Putting Holes in Happiness
Bonnie and Clyde were an American criminal couple who lived during the Great Depression. They traveled around the United States and performed various robberies and multiple murders, before being killed by the police during an ambush. Their story was romanticized in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, and their us-against-the-world abandon lifestyle greatly appealed to Manson.
Aside from Bonnie and Clyde, this song was also partly inspired by Evan, who woke him up the next day with a kiss after licking a heart shaped lollipop, and he told her she tasted like Valentine's Day (this ended up being a line in the lyrics). The song was written and recorded that same day, which happened to be his birthday (hence all the birthday metaphors in the lyrics), and contains some imagery directly imported from spending time with Evan on that day. For example, the opening line 'the sky was blonde like her', is in fact literal, further continuing Manson's experimentation with writing about the here and now.
Lyrically, it's really interesting to me that he meant to write about a relationship gone good and ended up writing a song that fits so well into the category of a bitter breakup. I think that it betrays a certain fatalistic view that expects things to end in disaster, and that the best you could hope for in the face of such circumstance is to have the best ride possible to that destination. To put holes in something is to gradually dismantle it, like putting holes in someone's argument means to point out errors and inconsistencies until the argument falls apart. It could easily be interpreted as the process of ruining a relationship until it gets to the point of a breakup, but if you look at it through the Bonnie and Clyde lens, it's best interpreted as "ruining happiness together". Happiness is about to get ruined either way, we might as well be madly in-love while that happens.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| The sky was blonde like her it was a day to take the child out back and shoot it. | The sky is a canvas of awe. It has inherent beauty, but it's also a thing that is out of
reach and thus easy to project our fantasies upon. Seeing another person's beauty projected
from things that isn't that person (like nature) is a symptom of being in love, and that is
what this line describes. A child is something precious that is created collaboratively by two people in a relationship, so it can be a symbol for the relationship itself. I think that to shoot the child means to kill the relationship. |
| I could have buried all my dead up in her cemetery head | His dead are all the metaphorical skeletons in his closet. Being able to bury them in her head means that she was like an accepting confidant, and he was able to finally put them to rest by confiding in her. |
| she had dirty word witchcraft I was in the deep end of her skin. | Obvious reference to seduction and sex. This and the previous line basically detail how he was in-love and what the relationship was like. |
| Then...it seemed like a one car wreck but I knew it was a horrid tragedy Ways to make the tiny satisfaction disappear. | Given the background of the song, I think this is part is probably inspired by Bonnie
And Clyde. In the movie, their crime spree (and thus romance) was finally stopped by
a police ambush that shot them to death in their car. So while it looked like a one car
wreck, what it represented was the horrid tragedy of their love story ending. With regards to the "tiny satisfaction", people often say that it's the little things that maintain and make a relationship feel great. To make the tiny satisfaction(s) disappear somewhat ties in with the title of the song, because it's their gradual elimination that will eventually make the relationship wilt and die. |
| Blow out the candles on all my frankensteins. At least my death wish will come true. You taste like Valentines and we cry, You're like a birthday. I should have picked the photograph it lasted longer than you. | Blowing out the candles is a birthday tradition. To blow out the candles on something is to
extinguish it, and a Frankenstein is something that is built from various disjointed parts,
often to a result that looks messed up and broken (although functional). For Manson,
frankensteins are his art. Describing it as frankensteins can be seen as honest (given his
artistic style) or self-deprecating, but the point is that he is extinguishing them. Thus,
it's not a birthday wish, it's a deathday wish, because for an artist extinguishing your art
is an act of death. There is some bitterness in the lyrics of this song, and "at least my death wish will come true" is one such line. It sounds like the act of begrudgingly looking for a silver lining in a situation you've given up on hoping to salvage. "I should've picked the photograph it lasted longer than you" is another bitter line, as is to some extent "ways to make the tiny satisfaction disappear", which to me sounds like a sarcastic 'good job on making everything worse' kind of sentiment. The photograph makes multiple appearances in the Eat Me, Drink Me era, and is a key symbolism for the era. A photograph is something that preserves a memory of a person, but it's also something that reduces that person's complexity to a much more limited representation. It's therefore not a substitute for the real thing, but at the same time, because it's such a flat representation of the person, it gives you room to project your idealization of that person unto the image. So, a photograph in Manson's work is like a snapshot of an idealization. |
| Putting holes in happiness We'll paint the future black if it needs a color. My death sentence is now a story who'll be digging when you finally let me die? The romance of our assassination If you're Bonnie, I'll be your Clyde. But the grass is greener here and I can see all of your snakes. You wear your ruins well please run away with me to hell | This is a verse that sounds a bit confused unless you view it from the "we're destined to be
doomed either way" kind of lens. It's a verse that more than anything incapsulates the idea
that he would love to revel in self-defeating negativity with her, because that's all there
is to look forward to.Putting holes in happiness "Putting holes in happiness" I already explained in the introduction. They may be ruining happiness, but at least they do it together. "We'll paint the future black if it needs any color" is just another way of saying the same thing. They're going to make the future grim (but at least they'll make it grim together). The romance of our assassination He is her Clyde, and she is his Bonnie, they're going to die, and it'll be romantic because they are together. My death sentence is now a story This verse introduces some hints that they're also each other's foil. If his death sentence is a story, then she's the one that is writing it (since she decides when he finally dies). It's like a complicated way of saying that she'll be the death of him. But the grass is greener here and This is a play on the saying "the grass is always greener on the other side", which refers to people's tendency to fantasize about how better everything is elsewhere. In other words, the grass is there, on the other side, not here. Since Manson converted it to "here", it's meant to imply that where he is now, that is- with her- is the better place to be. This is despite the fact that being "here" with her means being around her snakes. Snakes is a popular metaphor for evil, and someone who is full of snakes is someone who can't be trusted. So at first glance it might seem like a bad thing that she has snakes, but in the upside-down perspective this song is written from, this too has a flip side: the fact that he can see the snakes means there is trust and intimacy. Trust plays a dual role in this case: on one hand, if there wasn't trust between them, she would never allow him to see her snakes, so trust is required for the snakes to be revealed, and on the other hand, seeing her snakes is itself trust building, because it's easier to trust someone when you know exactly what they can do, rather than someone who is a question mark. You wear your ruins well "You wear your ruins well" is a way of saying that she is damaged in a way he finds beautiful, and regardless of all the complications above, he still wants to share hell with her. |
| Blow out the candles on all my Frankensteins. At least my death wish will come true. You taste like Valentines and we cry, You're like a birthday. I should have picked the photograph it lasted longer than you. |
The Red Carpet Grave
This song is mostly about how Manson felt being criticized by Dita, and a little bit about how he felt about his art being turned into a product, with the common theme being that in both cases it's his celebrity status that's inflicting these torments upon him.
His celebrity status was the thing that made his relationship die, since it was his artistic persona that caused the schism with Dita, and his celebrity status was also the reason why his art was killed off by being transformed from art to a product.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| They call her bulldozer speech demon without distractions of hope. She makes the depression business look surprisingly novel. And she's not just royal, allegedly loyal not unfaithful but she has no faith in me. | A bulldozer is a large and heavy tractor that completely demolishes things by driving into
them with its huge metal plate. So a bulldozer speech demon is a woman who verbally
demolishes someone. She leaves no room for any ray of light, her criticism drives one to
depression in incredibly sophisticated ways, and she has no faith in him and doesn't have
his back (she is only allegedly loyal, in reality she isn't). The phrase "not unfaithful" plays a dual role, depending on what line you contrast it with. When compared to the preceding line (allegedly loyal, not unfaithful) it explains what he means by "allegedly loyal". "Allegedly loyal" can sound like she cheated on him, so "not unfaithful" is a clarification: "I don't mean that she was unfaithful (cheated), just that I can't count on her having my back". When you contrast the phrase with the next line (not unfaithful but she has no faith in me), it becomes a word play. She is not lacking in ability to have faith in someone (not unfaithful), it's just that she doesn't believe in him specifically. The use of the word 'royal' also deserves of some attention, because later in the song "EAT ME, DRINK ME" we meet the character of the Queen of Hearts from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and it seems from the context of the song that the queen is meant to represent Dita. The use of the word 'royal' in this song lends additional credence to that interpretation. |
| Inhale the damage smoothly Paradise isn't lost, it was hiding all along. | "Paradise isn't lost" is a reference to Paradise Lost, a poem by John Milton.
The poem is about the biblical story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of
Eden. You can view it as the first lovers to have fallen out of paradise, which in itself is
a metaphor for the state of being where everything is good. A relationship is supposed to be
a sort of paradise for the lovers (or at least that's how it's idealized to be), so Manson
and Dita's collapsing marriage is their own fall from paradise. When reflecting about his failed marriage, Manson said that his error was that he tried to make himself happy by choosing the conventional, conservative option of marriage, while he himself was anything but conventional and conservative. So, what this lyric says is "take all of this damage in with acceptance (smoothly), and realize that what's happening to you is not the loss of a paradise, but rather you're discovering that your paradise is elsewhere". |
| There's the ones that you love, the ones that love you, the ones that make you come... the ones that make you come unglued. | You should probably see this verse as an elaboration of the above point. It's like he's going through it in his head and realizing that a relationship isn't a monolithic concept of a paradisal state, but rather something that has various dynamics. Some people love you, some people you love, some people are great sex, some people make you come apart. |
| I can't turn my back on you when you are walking away. | I don't trust you. |
| Bottomless celebrity scar staged circuses for schoolgirls, us boys are all dressed up like a mediocre suicide omen. Here comes the red carpet grave Again and again and again, oh man. | This verse talks about how showbusiness is ruining people and destroys art.Bottomless celebrity scar A scar is an injury that didn't heal properly, and never will, so "bottomless celebrity scar" is expressing the never-ending damage fame does to people. staged circuses for schoolgirls, In the part of show business that aims for mass appeal, themes of pain and darkness, which are supposed to be sincere artistic expressions, are instead turned by into a spectacle, a circus of image and mediocrity aimed at being appealing to teenage girls. This is one way that art can die. The red carpet is obviously a reference to celebrity, since it's traditionally used in ceremonial and formal occasions to mark the route to the event entrance. One of its notable uses is at the Oscars and the Grammys. Manson's celebrity became a grave in the sense that it was the core of his professional life, and it was his professional life that directly contributed to the ruin of his relationship with Dita. It was also a grave because being part of show business was killing his art by making it into a product. The red carpet grave comes again and again and again, signifying that there's no escaping from it. |
| There's the ones that you love, the ones that love you, the ones that make you come, the ones that make you come unglued. I can't turn my back on you, when you are walking away. There's the ones that you love, the ones that love you, the ones that make you come, the ones that make you come unglued. | |
| It's easy to beat the system, had a hard time beating the symptoms... | Manson is someone who based his life on being outside of the conventional and the socially acceptable. Beating the system is a second nature to him, but the repercussions of doing that (the symptoms), are hard to deal with. This is kind of an ironic look at the themes of the song, because he became a rebel to be a free artist, yet it's his success at being a rebel that put him in the show business prison, exactly what he was trying to avoid. |
| I can't turn my back on you, When you are walking away. Here comes the red carpet grave again and again and again, Oh man. |
They Said That Hell's Not Hot
This song is about how love never succeeds, and ends up in ruins no matter what you do. It's
also about losing oneself in a failed relationship. What does that have to do with the song
title? Good question.
The title technically suggests the opposite; The phrase "they said that hell's not hot" implies
a continuation that says "but it is", and that's congruent with all the fire metaphors on the
album that describe love. "Love is a fire", says Manson on the song "Just A Car Crush Away". A
fire is hot. Hell is hot. Love is hell.
However, the phrasing itself is peculiar. Why would we even ponder the idea that hell might not
be hot if it's the most common conception of hell? The answer could be that it's meant to be a
reference to Dante's The Divine Comedy, which is essentially the only popular work
of art that describes hell as a cold place. In Dante's Divine Comedy hell is divided into 9
circles, not all of which are cold, but the innermost circle, which is the furthest removed from
God, is a frozen lake. According to the Comedy's lore it's reserved for the worst type of
sinners: people who have betrayed the trust of someone or something close and special. It also
happens to be where Satan himself is trapped.
Although there isn't much in the song lyrics to tie the song to Dante's Divine Comedy, if we
accept the connection on the grounds that there's essentially nothing else to tie the title to,
it does bring some interesting interpretations, like the idea that Manson sees himself as being
in that 9th circle of hell where it's supposed to be cold (only to discover that it isn't). This
could simply be an exaggeration: his pain is so great, that the hell he is in must be the
deepest layer of hell there is. But it could also suggest that he feels he had betrayed someone,
and since the song is about a failed relationship and how it's "just another girl left in tears",
that someone might be Dita, whom he betrayed by falling in love with someone else.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| I kill myself in small amounts in each relationship it's not about love. Just another funeral and just another girl left in tears. | A theme that runs through this song is that relationships are where you go to suffer, and
that the inevitable suffering is a repeating pattern. In this verse he talks about how he slowly destroys himself in each relationship, and how it's just another funeral and another girl left in tears. in each relationship it's not about love Love never seems to be good enough to stave off the inevitable. It's not about love because the existence of love is never the deciding factor. If it was all about love, he would've had his happy ending. |
| And I'm waiting with the sound turned off I'm waiting like a glass balloon and I'm fading into the void and then I'm gone, I'm gone, I'm gone... | What is he waiting for? Maybe for things to turn around. The part about the sound being turned off could be an allusion to his giving up on music. He gave up on music and waited for things to get better, which they didn't. Giving up on his music was giving up on himself, which is why he is now fading. |
| They said that hell's not hot | |
| I gave my soul to someone else she must have known that it was already sold. It was never about her, it was about the hurt. | I gave my soul to someone else He falls in-love with someone (gives her his soul), but she doesn't see value in it as a gift. The wording "someone else" can be interpreted as a generic statement (he fell in love with someone), or if we embrace the betrayal interpretation I suggested in the introduction, it can also be interpreted as someone who isn't his current relationship. Both interpretations are equally functional. Manson is either telling a generic story of love that doesn't work, or the story of how he fell in love with Evan while still in a relationship with Dita, but Evan wasn't interested (indeed, Evan is on record saying that initially she wasn't interested in him romantically). It was never about her, And once again we return to the idea that anything good in the relationship never seem to be the deciding factor. Just like it's never about love, it's also never about the person you pick. Only the hurt has the final say. |
| I'm waiting like a glass balloon and I'm fading into the void and then I'm gone, I'm gone, I'm gone... They said that hell's not hot I kill myself in small amounts In each relationship it's not About love. Just another funeral and just another girl left in tears And I'm waiting with the sound turned off I'm waiting like a glass balloon and I'm fading into the void and then I'm gone, I'm gone, I'm gone... They said that hell's not hot |
Just A Car Crash Away
This is the first song that was written for the album, and it's essentially a very honest and straightforward description of how he felt about his marriage. It's about him realizing that his relationship with Dita cannot succeed, because the only way for it to succeed is for one of them (or both of them) to be destroyed by it.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| Love is a fire. Burns down all that it sees. Burns down everything. Everything you think Burns down Everything you say. | Love is described as something that consumes and destroys you with full totality. For someone who was losing his identity for his marriage, it's a fairly apt description. |
| She blew me her death-kiss And the mouth-marks Bled down my eye, Like her dying On my windshield. I can already feel Her worms Eating my spine. | There are two parts to this verse, the death kiss, and the car crash. A kiss of death is an idiom for an action that ultimately leads to ruin or failure. The origin of the phrase is from the story of Jesus, in which Judas kisses Jesus to covertly identify him to those that would put him to death. So, she blows him a death kiss, and it leaves a mark on him which he can no longer unsee. He hits her with his car, so he is responsible for killing her. Worms are the creatures that devour carcasses, so her worms are the repercussions from him killing her. These repercussions eat away at his spine, which symbolizes resolve. So, he is tormented by killing her, and he feels himself losing his confidence because of it. Taken together, there's a bunch of ways we can connect the two parts, but personally I think that the verse is painting a picture of what it means that their love can't succeed without a disaster. |
| So how can it be this lonely? Is this all we get For our lives? Is love only sweeter when One of us dies? | Is love only sweeter when one of us dies? He sees no way for love to succeed without destroying one of the lovers. |
| Then I knew that our love was Just a car crash away. I knew that our love was Just a car crash away. | To reach love, he has to go through the disaster of the car crash, but ironically, this will destroy one of the lovers, and then there will be no one to have a relationship with. It's an impossible conundrum in which you lose either way. |
| Love is a fire. Burns down all that it sees. Burns down everything. Everything you think Burns Down Everything you say. I knew that our love was Just a Car Crash Away. I knew that our love was Just a Car Crash Away. Love is a fire. Burns down all that it sees. Burns down everything. Everything you think Burns Down Everything you say. |
Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand)
One day Evan, who is significantly younger than Manson, showed up at his house wearing heart shaped glasses reminiscent of the movie poster for Kubrick's Lolita, as a way to joke about their age difference. Manson then said to her what he says in the chorus (don't break my heart or I will break your heart shaped glasses), and thus this song was born. Of all the songs in this album, this is the one that is the most inspired by Evan, and is basically about Manson's love for her.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| She reminds me of the one in school when I was cutting she was dressed in white And I couldn't take my eyes off her but that's not what I took off that night And she'll never cover up what we did with a dress no she said "kiss me, it will heal but it won't forget." | The word 'cutting' in the second line isn't referring to literally cutting, but to the
practice of 'cutting school', meaning to intentionally miss classes. It's meant to describe
the song's protagonist as a teenage rebel (the Clyde to the Bonnie he's describing in the
song). The word play in the second half of this verse essentially describes them having sex, and stating that it's the kind of sex one can't just walk away from. That's why she could never cover up what they did with a dress. It's a line that doesn't work in a literal sense, but therein lies its symbolism. Under normal circumstances, you could just put your dress back on and continue with your life like nothing happened. The fact that it's not possible to do in this case, suggests that the sex was incredibly impactful. "Kiss me it will heal but it won't forget" is employing the idea of hurt to imply intimacy. Vulnerability is a necessary ingredient in intimacy, and vulnerability literally means being in a position where you are easily hurt. This is why it's common in BDSM play to use pain to heighten the sense of vulnerability which translates to a heightened sense of intimacy if the pain remains within acceptable boundaries (obviously too much pain, or the kind of pain that crosses the other person's limits, does not yield the same effect). In this line, the tone is very tender, meaning that we're within that acceptable range of hurt that emphasizes the closeness, rather than being traumatic. |
| And I don't mind you keeping me on pins and needles. If I could stick to you and you could stick me too. | "Pins and needles" is a phrase that means being in a nervous state of anticipation. |
| Don't break, don't break my heart and I won't break your heart-shaped glasses Little girl, little girl you should close your eyes That blue is getting me high making me low | As described in the introduction, the heart shaped glasses in this case are literal, but
it's also an obvious metaphor for seeing the world through the eyes of love. Metaphorically,
to break her heart shaped glasses is to disillusion her about love. The word play in the last two lines is: Getting me high- making me feel ecstatic. Making me low- causing me to behave in indecent ways, which in the context of this song means sexual ways. In other words she's making him high and horny. |
| She reminds of the one I knew that cut up the negatives of my life I couldn't take my hands off her she wouldn't let me be anywhere but inside | 'Negative cutting' was the way people edited films in the early days of cinema when filming
with a 35mm film was the standard. The negative is the strip of film on which the scenes
were burned by the camera, and the negative cutter was a person who would literally cut the
film to get rid of the takes that the director chose not to use. The final result of only
the best takes glued together would then be sent to a studio that created the master film
roll from the patched strips of film. By saying that she cut up the negatives of his life means that she was creating the best version of his life, much like how the negative cutter would only keep the best takes of the scenes as picked by the director. It's also a line that does a pretty good job of implying that she was getting rid of the "negative things in his life", without the need for the filmmaking geekery. |
| And I don't mind you keeping me on pins and needles. If I could stick to you and you could stick me too. Just don't break, don't break my heart and I won't break your heart-shaped glasses Little girl, little girl you should close your eyes That blue is getting me high making me low And she'll never cover up what we did with a dress no she said "kiss me, it will heal but it won't forget. And I don't mind you keeping me on pins and needles. If I could stick to you and you could stick me too. Don't break, don't break my heart and I won't break your heart-shaped glasses Little girl, little girl you should close your eyes That blue is getting me high making me low |
Evidence
When Manson and Dita got divorced, they both talked a lot about their irrevocable differences, but at the same time there were some things that remained shrouded in mystery. It was said for example that Dita did not approve of Manson's friendship with "a certain woman", which we can only assume was Evan, but that is a rather generic statement that could mean a bunch of things. It was also said by Dita that there was a certain event that made her realize that she had to "get out of here", and which drove her to file for divorce, but the nature of the event was not disclosed at the time. Then, in 2021, she finally said it outright: "I left 12 months later [after getting married] due to infidelity and drug abuse", validating my theory that this song is about Manson cheating on Dita with Evan. My "evidence" for this theory is that the lyrics are talking about having sex with a woman and hiding the evidence, and then the video for Heart Shaped Glasses opens with a scene of Manson and Evan having sex in Manson and Dita's bed, while the instrumental version of Evidence plays in the background.
The lyrics are partly inspired by Fritz Leiber's short story The Girl With The Hungry Eyes. It is a story told by an unnamed photographer from the late 1940s, who strikes gold when a mysterious wannabe model picks him to be her exclusive photographer. Despite him being a rather mediocre photographer, his photographs of her become hot commodity due to her unusually seductive eyes, and soon she is used in advertisements all over town.
That's the real reason she's plastered all over the country today, you know- those eyes. Nothing vulgar, but just the same they're looking at you with a hunger that's all sex and something more than sex. That's what everybody's been looking for since the Year One- something a little more than sex.
Over time, the photographer begins to realize the dark nature of what the girl is.
There are vampires and vampires, and the ones that suck blood aren't the worst.
...
I realized that wherever she came from, whatever shaped her, she's the quintessence of the horror behind the bright billboard. She's the smile that tricks you into throwing away your money and your life. She's the eyes that lead you on and on, and then show you death. She's the creature you give everything for and never really get. She's the being that takes everything you've got and gives nothing in return. When you yearn toward her face on the billboards, remember that. She's the lure. She's the bait. She's the Girl.
The idea of the unattainable girl who lures your soul with eyes full of hunger for you is at the heart of this song. The girl in the song is actually attainable, but at the same time his experience with her is mixed with a deep sense of longing, as if she is never attainable enough, because his desire for her is insatiable, so he is always in a state of wanting more of her.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| You have eyes that lead me on and a body that shows me death your lips look like they were made for something else but they just suck my breath | You have eyes that lead me on This line is almost verbatim from Fritz's passionate description of the girl's seductiveness. "A body that shows me death" can also be interpreted as a playful way of saying "a body to die for". "To die for" is an idiom that means "to strongly wish for", as in- her body is very tempting for him. Your lips look like they were made for something else More sexual innuendo that ends with death. In Fritz's story this metaphor is actually extended to the literal, as the men who pick up his mysterious model all end up dead from a mysterious heart attack. |
| I want your pain to taste why you're ashamed and I know you're not just what you say to me and I'm not the only moment you're made of | There's a longing quality to this verse. "I want to be so close to you that I'll feel your
pain and know your deepest secrets (taste why you're ashamed). I want to be your world, but
I know that I'm not, because there's a 'you' beyond what you say to me and beyond the moment
we spend together. There's a 'you' that is out of my reach". This section is also inspired by Fritz's story. Towards the end of the story, the photographer finally decides to make a move on the girl, but in the last moment regrets his decision and escapes. Before his escape, the girl tells him this: I want you. I want your high spots. I want everything that's made you happy and everything that's hurt you bad. I want ...[a list of things he told her about himself]... I want your wanting me. I want your life. Feed me, baby, feed me. |
| You're so sudden and sweet All legs, knuckle, knees Head's blown clean off your mouth's paid off Fuck me 'til we know it's unsafe and we'll paint over the evidence | You're so sudden and sweet The 'sudden' part is inspired by the impulsivity of her youth. As you get older, you become more subdued as you lose some of that bubbly energy you were full of when you were young. You don't just spring to action for the things you like as much as you used to, rather you steadily get up and go for them. It can be really invigorating to reconnect with that energy via a relationship with someone who still possesses that energy. Fuck me 'til we know it's unsafe and we'll paint over the evidence ...because it's not a relationship, it's an affair. |
| I want you wanting me I want what I see in your eyes so give me something to be scared of don't give me something to satisfy | I want you wanting me Again, lines inspired by Fritz's story. "I want you wanting me" is what the girl says to the photographer before he escapes her. "I want what I see in your eyes" is a reference to the hunger in her eyes. give me something to be scared of He doesn't want the subdued, comfortable version, he wants the full intensity of her, so intense it's frightening. |
| You're so sudden and sweet all legs, knuckle, knees Head's blown clean off your mouth's paid off Fuck me 'til we know it's unsafe and we'll paint over the evidence I want your pain to taste why you're ashamed And I know you're not just what you say to me And I'm not the only moment you're made of You're so sudden and sweet legs, knuckle, knees Head's blown clean off your mouth's paid off Fuck me 'til we know it's unsafe and we'll paint over the evidence |
Are You the Rabbit?
At the time in which the album was conceived, Manson was working on his first full-feature film called Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carrol, which is an Alice in Wonderland themed story about the author of the book, so this is why this song has a bunch of Alice in Wonderland imagery. This song is basically a warning for a potential lover not to get into a relationship with him because he is a damaged person.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| I'm a kick stand in your mouth and I'm the tongue slamming on the brakes pull the choke in pull the choke in as hard as it will take. All your pictures are getting dirty I don't want anyone else's hand on my gears And I'll choke on all the diamonds like a vulture on your face | This verse combines sexual imagery with motor vehicle imagery. Most of them should be
familiar to the readers (kickstand, breaks, gears), but there's one term you might be
unfamiliar with, which is the "choke". The choke is a valve that was used in naturally
aspirated engines to regulate air intake. It was manually operated by the driver and was
almost universal in automobiles until the advent of fuel injection technology. This verse sets up the concept of equating having sex with him to being on a car ride. |
| So ask yourself before you get in I know the insurance won't cover this Are you the rabbit or the headlight and is there room in your life for one more breakdown? | This verse is a warning. Are you sure you want to get on this ride? It's going to end badly,
are you ready for this? And do you really understand what you are getting into? The line 'are you the rabbit or the headlight?' is a play on the phrase 'like a deer in headlights', but the deer is replaced with a rabbit for that Alice in Wonderland theme. Deer are notorious for being so paralyzed by the sight of approaching headlights, that whenever a vehicle is driving towards them they just stands there and often get hit. It's a metaphor for someone who is so ill equipped to handle the incoming danger that they have no option but to be victimized by it. So, Manson is asking: 'are you that helpless naïve person that will get hit by the car, or are you the one driving the car'? |
| You can't escape Can't escape all your demons All you demons "Watch out, watch out for your lovers" | A lover is just as dangerous as any other demon. |
| Faster, faster faster-faster-faster faster-faster-faster I'm late, I'm late And the hands on my clock are starting to shake | This is reminiscent of the rabbit character from Alice in Wonderland. When Alice first meets
him in the novel, he is rushing to some event that he is late to. "The hands on my clock" might be intended to mean "the hands on my cock", since sexual innuendos are the main ingredient in this song. |
| We're on the line between the devil's tits and we've been driving on E. I'm going to be wanted for this crime "Well, at least you're wanted" She'll say | The Devil's Tits is a strain of Marijuana. The E in "driving on E", is likely a slang for
ecstasy. It's a play on the fact that in automatic gear transmissions, the different modes
are labelled using letters, which are usually P, R, N, D, and L. There actually exists a car
model from Toyota that has an E in the automatic transmission switch, but that is very niche
trivia and unlikely to be what Manson was going for, especially in light of the fact that
the previous line was about drugs. So taken together, they're driving under the influences of drugs, going faster and faster, and the entire drive is a kind of crime on its own. |
| So ask yourself before you get in I know the insurance won't cover this Are you the rabbit or the headlight and is there room in your life for one more breakdown? | |
| You are an unmarked car I can't remember where I parked you but I love you can't afford you I'll take a cab to the funeral. Faster, faster, faster-faster-faster Faster-faster-faster I'm late, I'm late And the hands on my clock are starting to shake. | |
| You can't escape Can't escape all your demons All you demons "Watch out, watch out for your lovers" So ask yourself before you get in I know the insurance won't cover this Are you the rabbit or the headlight and is there room in your life for one more breakdown? |
Mutilation Is the Most Sincere Form of Flattery
This is an ego trip song, saying that he's one of the few artists who still has anything to say, and although many try to imitate him, they don't even come close to living up to his standard. The song title is a play on the phrase 'imitation is the most sincere form of flattery'.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| Hey there's no rules today. You steal instead of borrow You take all the shapes that I make And you think that you thought all the thoughts that I thought you, Don't you? Mutilation's the most sincere form of flattery If you want to be me, then stand in line like the rest. Now, do you know what I mean? The young get less bolder The legends get older But I stay the same as long as you have less to say Do you think that I wouldn't say this? You know that I play this better than you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you and fuck you too | He's the only true Rockstar left, he's the only one who has anything to say, he has been like that forever and will stay like that forever. The people who want to imitate him do it poorly, and he doesn't care for how they try to take credit for his ideas. |
| Rebels without applause I sell my shadow to those who are standing in it They think that I would bitch about them thinking they are the shit when they can't even step in it | Rebels without applause is a play on Rebels Without A Cause, the name of a 1955
American drama movie about emotionally confused middle class teenagers. The Rockstar is of
course the quintessential rebel, but unlike him, when his imitators try to be rebels, nobody
cares about their rebellion (get no applause). To stand in somebody's shadow means to be in the position where you are constantly compared against the achievements of that person, so Manson is suggesting that the imitators pale so much in comparison to him that they don't even have what it takes to be in his shadow (be in the same category as him). "We will sell our shadow to those who stand within it" was the slogan of the Celebriterian Corporation, which is the name Manson gave to his self proclaimed art movement. |
| The young get less bolder The legends get older But I stay the same as long as you have less to say Do you think that I wouldn't say this? You know that I play this better than you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you Fuck you fuck you fuck you and fuck you too |
You and Me and The Devil Makes 3
The phrase "You and me and the devil makes three" can be tracked down to a nursery rhyme called "Didn't Leave Nobody But The Baby", which originated amongst African American slaves in the southern US. The nursery rhyme seems to describe the infanticide of an abandoned baby. It's mostly soft and nurturing throughout, describing a person taking care of a baby, until we get to the second to last verse, where suddenly we discover that they're not alone, the devil is there with them, and the tone of the song becomes eerie, suggesting that something terrible is about to happen:
Go to sleep you little baby
Go to sleep you little baby
You and me and the devil makes three
Don't need no other lovin baby
When asked about the song in an interview, Manson said that the idea behind the title was that the devil is within him, and that's why they're a party of 3. This is a very Jungian sentiment...
Carl Jung was one of the forefathers of modern psychology (you could say that he was to psychology what Einstein was to physics), and amongst many of his insights was the idea that being harmless doesn't make you moral, because morality is asserted through choice, and harmlessness is by definition an inability to choose being bad. A bunny is not 'good', it just can't do anything bad. According to Jung, in order to truly be a moral person, you need to have the ability to be a monster, and then make a conscious choice not to act like that, and that means getting to know the side of yourself that is capable of aggression and deceit, look it in the eyes, and learn it, so that it no longer runs around in your psyche unsupervised, as it does when you're blind to the way it works, or in denial of its existence.
This song can be seen as Manson observing and exploring through imagery and symbolism the side of himself that's a pain to be in a relationship with.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| I'm just like rolling a stone up a hill in the Hades if you want to lie with me you're going to be a liar | "Rolling a stone up a hill in Hades" is a reference to Sisyphus, a figure from Greek
mythology who was sentenced to roll a stone up a hill for eternity. In other words, Manson
is like a difficult punishment.If you want to lie with me you're going to be a liar Why is lying with him will make someone a liar? Could be because it's an affair, could be because he's not someone you want to be associated with, could be because he'll have you cover up for him... Either way, getting involved with him means taking on a burden (psychologically, lying is a burden). |
| Hell-flavored I've got mood poisoning you must be something that I hate I'm just a prison of property buckets full of better misery | Lots of word play in this verse: Hell-flavored I've got food poisoning You must be something that I ate I'm just a person of property, Buckets full of bitter misery You get food poisoning from something you ate, and you get mood poisoning from something or someone you hate. |
| There's not a word for what I want to do to you | That's another way of saying he wants to do unspeakable things to her (there's no words for them, hence you can't speak them). |
| You and me and the devil makes 3 You and me | |
| Murdercute happyrape murdercute happy, happy, happyrape killer | Murdercute is a word play on the term "meet-cute", which refers to the type of scene in romantic comedies where a couple meets, often in "cute" circumstances. I don't know what "happyrape" is a play on. |
| Watch out your face my sperm's cold as ice bouquet of knives, killer | The part about sperm is describing cumshots, the practice of ejaculating on a partner. Within the context of heterosexual porn, the most popular target for cumshots is a woman's face. |
| You and me and the devil makes 3 you and me 1-2-3 if you get in bed someone will fall in love you and me and the devil makes 3 there's not a word for what I want to do to you | |
| If you get in bed someone will fall in love you and me and the devil makes 3 | So, the question is: who will fall in love with whom? Since there are 3 of them, it opens up
new possibilities, such as she might fall in love with the devil in him, or the devil
(instead of Manson) might be the one who falls in love with her. Or maybe Manson might fall
in love with the devil within him. Another way of looking at this part of the lyrics is that it employs the same technique from the nursery rhyme to turn something normal into something sinister. In the nursery rhyme, once the song title appears, it transforms a verse that otherwise would've been fairly innocent into something with very dark implications. So, in the Manson song, we can say that it gives the line "if you get in bed someone will fall in love" a sinister reinterpretation. The idea of looking at romance and falling in love as something sinister would continue to appear in Manson's work in subsequent albums (for example in the album Heaven Upside Down there's a song called Threats of Romance), and it stems from Manson's experience with heartbreak. As great as love can be, it can be a gateway to hell when it goes wrong, so is falling in love really a good thing? |
EAT ME, DRINK ME
This was the last song written for the album, and according to Manson that's the reason why it
finishes the album. In interviews, Manson described it as the song that ties everything together,
which stems from the fact that it makes references to pretty much every piece of literature
that's relevant to the Eat Me, Drink Me era, as well as all the real-life people and events that
inspired the album, and the album's main themes. Some of the imagery was inspired by Manson
stumbling upon one of his many notebooks that contained a bunch of erratic notes describing some
sort of visual scene (which might have been intended for his movie Phantasmagoria). This might
explain why the song is written like an Alice In Wonderland inspired play.
The song is best taken as a dream-like experience. Much like a dream, it meshes symbolic
representations of one's experience in a way that isn't necessarily coherent when interpreted
like a story but is coherent when interpreted like a map of emotions and context. It takes place
in a fictional play, where characters and events from Manson's life all have a role.
| Lyrics | Commentary |
|---|---|
| In the wasteland on the way to the Red Queen... It's no wonder our stage clothes have dreams to be famous. The trees in the courtyard are painted in blood, so I've heard. She hangs the headless upside down to drain. | I think that it's best to look at this verse like a scene of veiled exposition. It is not
written like it's trying to be an exposition, in fact it jumps straight to the symbolic
content, but it also happens to be written in such a way that explains to us what it is we
are seeing: an unreality. We are currently inside of a fantasy where we are not quite ourselves (there is us, and then there's our stage clothes, who are their own characters), and this is all a production- a play, or a movie. You're essentially invited to adopt this mindset for the rest of the song, which continues to hand out hints that it's not written from the point of view of literal reality (lines like 'this is only a game'. 'but then our star rushes in', 'the ending didn't test well'). The fantasy play/movie takes place in a wasteland because a wasteland is a dead and barren place, so it can function as a blank background. Dreams have a tendency of not having a backstory, and placing us in a wasteland achieves the same effect. There's nothing but the fact that we're on the way to the Red Queen. Everything else is irrelevant. The Red Queen is technically a character from the follow up novel to Alice in Wonderland: Through The Looking Glass, but the content of the lyrics strongly implies that when Manson is talking about the Red Queen, he's really referencing the Queen of Hearts from the original Wonderland novel. The hint is in the lines "She hangs the headless upside down to drain" (the Queen of Hearts loves ordering beheadings at the slightest provocation), and "The trees in the courtyard are painted in blood" (there's a scene in Alice in Wonderland where she meets servants of the queen as they are painting a tree of white roses red). I think that the Red Queen is meant to represent Dita for the following reasons:
It's no wonder our stage clothes I think that the proper interpretation for this line is that the stage clothes characters are our external ego. It's who we think we are, and who we present to the outside world. It reminds me of a phrase from Shakespeare's As You Like It: All the world's a stage, and all the men and women are merely players. |
| EAT ME, DRINK ME EAT ME, DRINK ME This is only a game, This is only a game. | Both of the lines in this section reference a state of fantasy, or a dream. "Eat me, drink me", is an Alice in Wonderland reference. In the first novel, a great deal of the plot is driven by Alice eating or drinking something that causes a magical transformation. Some of these consumables literally have a tag on them that say, 'eat me', or 'drink me'. The novel ends with Alice waking up from a dream. "This is only a game" is taken from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. In a scene where the phrase appears, the protagonist is describing his practice of going to a local park so that he could be around little girls, and shares one of the many fantasies he privately enjoyed: A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger's shivering child. Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench... |
| I was invited to a beheading today I thought I was a butterfly next to your flame. A rush of panic and the lock has been raped. This is only a game, this is only a game... | An Invitation To A Beheading is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, who also wrote
Lolita. It tells a story of a prisoner on death row who is awaiting his
execution, and is tormented by the fact that no one would tell him the date of the
execution. In the lyrics, Manson says he is invited to a beheading. Given what we know about the Red Queen, it looks like that is why he is going to see her. From the context of the novel that inspired the line, it's reasonable to assume that the beheading is his own. This is an allusion to his marriage. In the dream he goes to the Red Queen, who beheads people, to get beheaded, while in real life he went to Dita for marriage, which ended up being his metaphorical beheading. The connection is further reinforced by the next line 'I was a butterfly next to your flame'. In this album, fire is a metaphor for love that consumes all, and a moth is easily immolated by a flame. In other words, he was helpless against love, and consumed by it. "A rush of panic and the lock has been raped" is a reference to The Rape of The Lock, a mock epic poem by Alexander Pope. Despite what the name sounds like, it is not about the sexual assault of a key lock. The poem is in old English. The word "rape" in this case means "taking something without consent", and the "lock" refers to a lock of hair. The poem is based on a true event that happened in England. Two aristocratic families were at an event together, and Peter, a member of one family, cut off a lock of hair from one Arabella, a woman from the other family. The argument that ensued caused a breach between the two families, and the point of the poem was to clear the tensions between the two sides by satirizing it into absurdity to shift the tone from seriousness to something both sides could laugh about. It does so by transforming the incident into an epic-heroic tale of the Gods themselves. The mention of this poem represents a dramatic event, which could be an allusion to the moment where all hell broke loose in his life when Dita filed for divorce. This section more than anything outlines the story that the album as a whole is based on. He was helpless against love, and found himself heading to his own beheading at the hands of Dita, then a dramatic thing happened (the divorce), and in the next line, Evan rushes in to pick up the pieces like a hero that saves the day. |
| But then our star rushes in, feeling like a child and looking like a woman... She has been forecast with an attempt to kill herself, but the ending didn't test well. | At the end of Alice in Wonderland, Alice wakes up and recounts her adventures to her sister,
who then falls asleep herself, and has a dream inspired by Alice. At the end of the dream,
she:...pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers [Alice] would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood". In other words: feeling like a child and looking like a woman. This combination of maturity and childlike playfulness and purity of emotion is definitely something a grown man in his late 30s can find in a 19 year old woman, who is technically an adult, but still has a lot of that childlike passion from having recently being a teenager. So, I think that this star's entrance represents Evan's entrance into his life. She "rushes in", because of the dramatic, swift way she entered into his life. Why was she forecast with an attempt to kill herself? I'm not sure. In interviews Manson sometimes described Evan to be "as tragic as myself", so perhaps she had her own private demons that drove her to bad places. However, it looks like that fate has been rewritten. The ending didn't test well refers to the practice of "test screening", in which a select audience is shown a prerelease cut of the movie in order to gauge their reaction. It's generally done in productions where there's a conscious attempt to maximize mass appeal. When something "didn't test well", it means that the audience responded poorly to it, which will generally trigger a change to the movie such as a rewrite, or a rescore, or just a reshoot. In the case of TV show pilots, it can even result in an actor being replaced. So in this case, her suicide didn't test well, and was thus written out of her story. |
| I was invited to a beheading today I thought I was a butterfly next to your flame. A rush of panic and the lock has been raped. This is only a game, this is only a game... EAT ME, DRINK ME EAT ME, DRINK ME This is only a game, this is only a game. | |
| ??????? | This is the "secret verse", a verse which Manson did not include the lyrics for in the album booklet, and which he purposely cut up and mangled to make it hard to decipher. In an interview he said that he wanted people to hear it like they want to. |
| So picking my skin and my scales I see my horror mirrored in your sundown of a blank stare. | So far, we had two main characters, the harsh Red Queen that's about to behead him, the star that came into his life like a gift, and now here's him, the horror. |
| But then our star rushes in, feeling like a child and looking like a woman... She has been forecast with an attempt to kill herself, but the ending didn't test well. |
Artwork
The album artwork is a pretty straightforward collection of the album's symbolism. A great deal of it is taken from the music video for Heart Shaped Glasses.
- There's the butcher knife from If I Was Your Vampire
- The speedometer from all the car metaphors
- A heart shaped spiral akin to the spirals that are often used to represent hypnosis, symbolizing a common theme in Manson's work of being powerless against love
- Evan Rachel Wood
- Evan Rachel Wood wearing the heart shaped glasses that inspired the song Heart Shaped Glasses.
- Some images with blood, representing hurt and vulnerability. The Marilyn Manson MM logo is stylized like blood running down the walls.
- Manson dressed like a vampire.
Beyond the Record
Eat Me, Drink Me is notable for being a short era. Exactly a year after writing the lyrics for If I Was Your Vampire Manson was spending time at his home with his bandmate Twiggy, his girlfriend Evan, and his magician friend Rudy, and come 6:00 o'clock was struck with a realization that this chapter in his life was over.
I think that period [Eat Me, Drink Me] kind of ended when it was a year later on 6 a.m. Christmas morning this year. I was sitting there with Twiggy, and I was sitting there with Evan and my other best friend Rudy, who's a magician, and just thought "I've been waiting a year to be able to say '6 a.m. Christmas morning' since I wrote the song last year" and it felt like some sort of passage, some rite of passage, and it was over. That period was over, all of it. Some for the good, some for the bad, but I don't want to repeat it.
- Marilyn Manson, interview for The Aquarian
The album has since been sort of abandoned. With the exception of If I Was Your Vampire, none of the album's songs were featured in subsequent tours, and even If I Was Your Vampire is a rare sight on tour track lists.
Nevertheless, here's some info about the stuff that did happen post album release.
Visual style and promotion
Unlike previous eras for the band, the visual aesthetic for the band was a lot more subdued. The general theme was black clothing with the color red (or sometimes blue) for decoration. There are no promotional band photo sessions from this era, since this era heralded the end of the band operating as a collaborative unit, and the beginning of a new formula wherein Manson would collaborate with a primary songwriter, with the rest of the band essentially serving as live or session musicians. Nevertheless, the visual style that can be seen in Manson's solo promotional photoshoots could later be seen in the band's live appearance.
Promotional interviews for the album were conducted in a house that was decorated according to the album's themes. It featured the same red and black color theme, walls covered by blood, and was lit by candlelight. It also featured a variety of taxidermy animals.
Music videos
Heart Shaped Glasses
This is really the main music video for the Eat Me, Drink Me era, given that the only other video released during this era (Putting Holes in Happiness) is mostly a performance video without much additional content. Part of me wonders if the reason for that is because Manson blew all his music video budget on making sure Evan "be paid the most that any actress has ever been paid in music-video history".
The music video incorporates all the core symbolism from the era: photographs, butcher knife, car, heart shaped glasses, blood, fire, and of course, Evan Rachel Wood, and is also where a lot of the artwork in the Eat Me, Drink Me album comes from, so basically it's the be-all-end-all music video for the era.
The video opens with a cinematic intro. It starts with Manson and Evan having sex, illuminated by red lighting, and surrounded with darkness, with the song Evidence playing in the background. Red is the color of passion, and the combined effect of the red illumination and surrounding darkness creates an intimate setting in which there's nothing aside from the two of them.
We transition to a scene of the two of them driving a car at high speed at night, with Evan egging Manson to drive even faster. The concept of the scene is meant to be romantic since it's essentially a depiction of them being at the edge of danger together. They drink, kiss, and take photos of each other. Then the music video begins.
The main part of the video is a performance by the band, which is watched by Evan through her heart shaped glasses, wearing a dress shaped like the dress of Alice In Wonderland as she was depicted in the iconic Tenniel illustrations.
During the interlude we revisit the sex scene, and this time there's a rain of blood pouring on them, drenching both of them. Blood is a metaphor that can signify both hurt and vulnerability. Indeed, the two concepts are tied, given that being vulnerable with someone means being in a position to be easily hurt by them.
At the end of the music video, we return to the car ride scene. The two of them say "together as one, against all others", and drive off a cliff as the car goes up in flames. This is reminiscent of the suicide lyrics from the song If I Was Your Vampire. "Together as one, against all others" would later be used as a lyric in his follow up album The High End of Low on the song Running To The Edge of The World.
Finding the full version of the video for embedding is tricky, but you can watch the full version on MTV Germany. The song-only version is embedded below.
Putting Holes In Happiness
This is mostly a band performance video, with little additional content. The additional content it does have consists of two characters, a woman who seems to be close with Manson, and a kid with a frightened expression who falls down dead, which seems to be a reference to the "it's time to take the child out back and shoot it" line from the song. Aside from that, birthday candles make a few short appearances, and once Manson tries to bite the woman on the neck like a vampire, and that's basically it. There's also a lot of Manson raising his hand in front of the camera, which I think is related to the "hold my hand across your face" lyric from If I Was Your Vampire. Here, Manson is acting it out in the video.