round 1

(14) mountain goats, “the sign”
PUT TO BED
(3) marilyn manson, “sweet dreams”
254-157
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/3.

On “Sweet Dreams” (& Unease): danielle geller on marilyn manson

The week of the March Faxness draft, Kanye West staged a listening party for his new album Donda. His team built a replica of his childhood home and plopped it down on a mound of dirt in Chicago’s Soldier Field. During the opening performance, ye, DaBaby, and Marilyn Manson congregated on the front porch, where Manson leaned heavily on the black metal railing and looked more bored than menacing.
As the internet lit up with familiar outrage, condemnation, and faux disbelief, Evan Rachel Wood posted a video to Instagram with a simple dedication: “For my fellow survivors who got slapped in the face this week. I love you. Don't give up.” Fittingly, the video she posts is a cover of New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give,” which begins sweet and slow. But as the song patters into the lyrics that label Manson a fake and offer him a light ass-kicking, Wood drags a middle finger toward her heart:

That could be it for us. A survivor in a white dress reclaiming a moment. A small nod to a cover that didn’t meet the tournament’s criteria. You could walk away from this essay, cast your vote for the other song in this bracket, and move on. Or we could hang out a little longer and talk about sweet dreams.

*

When I first fell in love with Eurythmics’ original, I was a girl living in a trailer park in South Florida with my sister and grandmother and step-grandpa Don. I attended Catholic School. I took swimming lessons and ballet. I liked to read and climb trees and crush aluminum cans in the duck-billed can crusher nailed to the front porch. I collected toy horses called Grand Champions. I poured salt on my nightly bowl of ice cream and stirred it into a lukewarm soup.
There was an unease to my childhood, of course. We lived at or below the poverty line. My parents were alcoholics, which was how I came to live with my grandmother. My father was often in jail. I was taught to be distrustful, especially of my friend’s fathers and step-fathers, though more generally of men.
Unease is an emotion that clings to memory. It’s a particular shade of orange. The sound and shape of the word “birthday” in my mouth. The tension in Annie Lennox’s voice accompanied by an optimistic, synthetic beat. It’s South Florida, wood-paneled living rooms, and the hydrogen sulfide that contaminated the water in our well. Unease is a soggy boardwalk over a marsh. Empty peanut shells. It’s a young Brian Warner in his grandfather’s basement: the opening pages of Marilyn Manson’s memoir, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell.

*

As a high school freshman, I tried to convince my Honors English teacher to let me write a book report on his memoir. It was part provocation, part laziness; I had already read the book. She said no and then took it a step farther, calling a meeting with my grandmother to stage an intervention. But it had already been a few years since my grandmother lost sway over us girls.
After our step-grandpa died and we moved from Florida to central Pennsylvania, I quit ballet and toy horses and God. I started wearing oversized shirts from Hot Topic and jangly bondage pants. In the break-up letter I mailed to my Catholic School best friend, I claimed I worshipped Satan and that she wouldn’t understand.
In an interview Manson gave for The Observer in 2015, Carole Cadwalladr asked him, “Do you think that you created a monster as a way of externalising the difficult feelings you couldn’t cope with? You, Brian, gave them all to Marilyn Manson?” To which he responded, “Are you trying to mindfuck me?” He didn’t answer her question—no confirmation or denial. Instead he shifted gears, suggesting they move on to “more cheerful things.”
I can’t lie and say his character’s memoir didn’t resonate with me. My problems were more serious than my minor rebellions let on. Alone in my room after school, I met with much older men online. What began as role-playing wolves and vampires in fantasy chatrooms transitioned to playing a different kind of girl in back alleys and slave markets. One of these men liked that I was the same age as his son, though I lied, and he knew it—they all knew it—when I told them how old I was. Alone in my room, I walked an uneasy line between the girl I was and the girl these men told me to be over text, then on camera. As Marilyn Manson writes in his memoir, “…I had begun to feel removed from the world of morality. Guilt had become more a fear of getting caught than any sense of right or wrong.” But I knew how to be quiet, and I too had found a way of externalizing the guilt I once felt.

*

When Evan Rachel Wood refers to her abuser on social media, she calls him “Brian.” No room to conflate the reality of abuse with a character’s make-believe.

*

In Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1989, Brian Warner and Scott Putesky met at a club. Brian was a journalism student who liked writing sad and bad poetry, and Scott was a guy from Jersey who liked to play guitar. Scott thought it would be fun to form a band with a writer, and shortly after, Marilyn Manson & the Spooky Kids was born. Brian created the spectacle; Scott created the sound.
When I began working on this essay, I went back to Manson’s memoir. (I discreetly repurchased a used copy on the web.) Retelling those early years of the band, Brian fluctuates between dismissive (“…no one was particularly impressed by his guitar playing…”) and resentful of his cofounder Scott. (“He just kept bragging about the musical shit he could do.”) After the band collected a few new members and signed to Trent Reznor’s label, Nothing Records, Brian began to push Scott out. His absence from the new album’s demo concerned Reznor, who warned Brian that Scott’s guitar style was the backbone of Marilyn Manson.
Initially, I was surprised this conversation made it into the book. It gives Scott more credit than one might expect. In the world of music, isn’t it music that lends a band its credibility? Instead, Brian told Reznor, “… nobody even talks about the songs.”

*

In an interview with The Guardian about the origin of “Sweet Dreams,” Annie Lennox dispels its associations with sex or sadomasochism. Instead, she explains the lyrics came from a sense of hopelessness and nihilism about the music industry. “I felt like we were in a dream world, that whatever we were chasing was never going to happen,” she says. Her partner Dave Stewart (high on speed and thus slightly more optimistic) found her lyrics “mind-blowing, but depressing.” He suggested the addition of the lines “hold your head up, moving on” to make it “more uplifting.”
They set the music video in a record company’s boardroom. Annie Lennox sported a black business suit and cropped orange hair. They added a cow to the video meant to signify “reality.” The cow pissed everywhere.

*

Brian conceived of the “Sweet Dreams” cover during an acid trip in South Florida, when the band still had its Spooky Kids. “I need to get away from this surreal scene,” he writes, “away from all these people who are treating me like I’m some sort of star they can suck a little brightness out of.” He imagines the song slower, darker, meaner, which might have been closer to Annie Lennox’s version if not for the influence of her partner. It’s so often the people we love—who love us—that help us see outside ourselves.
Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams” is brought to life by Scott’s “Electric Twangdoodles” (as is credited on the album). “The track is slow and grimy, filthy, sleazy, teeming with decay,” The Cubist writes in a review on Nerd Bacon. “The guitar solo midway is the very antithesis of what it means to dream…” Scott’s guitar is meant to be destroyed in the song’s video shoot—at around the 1:00 minute mark you can see him half-heartedly knocking it against a wall—but is saved. (“So what if it keeps feeding back,” Brian recalls him saying.) As Scott’s place in the band became more uncertain, and to fill the time he wasn’t given to work on the new album, he began recording new songs with the “Sweet Dreams” guitar and his four-track recorder. Then Trent Reznor, seemingly frustrated with the band’s lack of progress on their new album, smashed it to pieces over an amp.
Scott opens his resignation letter to the band like a divorced father saying goodbye to his estranged kids. He absolves everyone—the Kids, Brian, and “Uncle Trent”—of any blame. “I do not want to say anything negative about your mom but we have agreed to see other people,” he writes. “We both love you all very much and we hope you understand.” The resignation shifts from personal to business abruptly, from heartfelt to a bullet-pointed list of grievances that include damage and destruction of personal instruments; creative, interpersonal, and business frustrations; exclusion from recordings; lack of compensation; and “blah, blah and blah…”
His resignation letter, along with sheet music, guitars, and Spooky Kids memorabilia, is put up for auction to cover medical expenses. In 2017, he died of colon cancer at the age of forty-nine.
After Scott’s passing, Brian posted a short tribute on Instagram: “Scott Putesky and I made great music together. We had our differences over the years, but I will always remember the good times more.” He told his fans to listen to “Man That You Fear” in his honor. It was their favorite, he said. Brian’s tribute to Scott has since disappeared from his page.

*

In 2007, Marilyn Manson released “Heart-Shaped Glasses,” an objectively terrible song. Its music video features Evan Rachel Wood, his then-girlfriend. Wood was nineteen; Brian, thirty-eight. Watching the video now is uneasy, as if I am made witness to her abuse.* In the publicity surrounding the song’s release, Brian drew allusions to Lolita, which he claimed to be reading at the time, though the song’s title is a reference to the red plastic glasses made popular in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita in 1962.
In an interview with BBC Radio One, he described a revelation he made while writing “Heart-Shaped Glasses,” saying song-writing “should be the part of your personality that you might feel guarded or too secret…” The thing is, Brian has never been guarded or secretive about abuse. There are many more timely articles that have been written about the red flags we collectively ignored: Jill Filipovic’s “Marilyn Manson bragged about abusing Evan Rachel Wood. No one listened.”; Kory Grow’s “Marilyn Manson: Monster Hiding in Plain Sight”; and Poppy Reid’s compilation of quotes from The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, among others. Given all we know about abusers, his issues with women are common and predictable, stemming from low self esteem and fear of rejection. It’s one of the reasons his ghost-writer called him the “perfect protagonist,” a man who “does everything he can to trick people into liking him” because he is so consumed with contempt for the world, and himself.
After the allegations against him became public, Brian posted this statement in self-defense:

Because his posts have a habit of disappearing, here is his statement transcribed:

Obviously, my art and life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims against me are horrible distortions of reality. My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners. Regardless of how—and why—others are now choosing to misrepresent the past, that is the truth.

Brian doesn’t spend much time on the “how—and why” his accusers are returning to the past, but context is important.
The first time Evan Rachel Wood came forward with her story was in 2018, when she testified before a House Judiciary Subcommittee in support of implementing the Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act at the state level. She did not name Brian Warner at that time.
In 2019, she testified in front of the California Senate Public Safety Committee in support of the Phoenix Act, which would extend the statute of limitations on domestic violence felonies from three years to five and require police officers to complete additional training on intimate partner violence. Her evidence, which included both photographs and video, could not be viewed by the state because the statute of limitations on her case had run out. She did not name Brian Warner at that time.
     She named her abuser a year ago, in February 2021, saying, among other things, that she was done living in fear.

*

A few weeks ago, Evan Rachel Wood donned a suit and ruffled blouse in homage of David Bowie’s Jareth, the Goblin King. January 8th of this year would have marked David Bowie’s 75th birthday, and last year marked the 35th anniversary of Labyrinth.
Labyrinth was the movie my sister and I rented every week at Blockbuster, so often my grandmother complained we never picked anything else. (She probably should have just bought us a copy.) We memorized every line, every song. Jareth was my second childhood crush; the first was The Lord of Darkness played by Tim Curry in Legend, which could explain how I ended up here.
Evan Rachel Wood captions one of her “Goblin Queen” photos with the title of a song, “As the World Falls Down,” a Geller household favorite. The song comes at a turning point in the movie when Jareth traps Sarah, the object of his affection, inside one of his dream crystals and the fantasy of a masquerade ball. He dresses her in a white gown that glitters with silver embroidery and surrounds her with cackling revelers in elaborate, devilish masks. As he stalks her through the room, he sings about the pain of obsession masquerading as love.
Jareth seemed so powerful, so sexy in his tight gray pants, so completely devoted to her. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you,” he sings as she runs up and down and around a twisting staircase that mirrors M.C. Escher’s Relativity. In their final scene together, she struggles to recall the lines of a play that hold the key to her freedom. She is distracted, half-hearted in her delivery. “Look, Sarah,” Jareth pleads. “Look what I’m offering you. Your dreams.” The final line comes to her like a revelation: You have no power over me. Jareth’s face twists in disappointment, but it is meant to be a moment of triumph, a moment I couldn’t comprehend as a girl. I knew Sarah was just dumb to turn down a guy like him.
Evan Rachel Wood captions one of her “Goblin Queen” photographs with the title of a song, “As the World Falls Down,” another Geller household favorite. The song comes earlier in the movie, after he traps Sarah inside one of his dream crystals and the fantasy of a masquerade ball. Wearing a white gown that glitters with silver embroidery, she finds herself surrounded by cackling revelers in elaborate, devilish masks. Jareth stalks her through the room and sings about the pain of obsession masquerading as love.

*

In both the original and the cover song, “Sweet Dreams” are made, formed in a particular place, by particular processes, the way ancient scholars once derived the world’s first true orange pigment from an arsenic sulfide mineral called rahj al-ġār (realgar). It is only after light exposure that the red mineral crumbles into a yellow-orange powder. In both the original and the cover song, “sweet” is tinged with saccharine naiveté, and one finds such dreams are made under the pressures of coercion, manipulation, and control.
In interviews with Brian after his relationship with Evan Rachel Wood ended, he claimed to have called her 158 times. “I wanted to show her the pain she put me through,” he said. He told reporters he fantasized about killing her with a sledgehammer. His team later backtracked, attributing the comments to a theatrical rock star generating publicity for a new album. But one wonders if Brian knows where the uneasy line between he and his character begins and ends.
The truth, if Brian goes looking for it, is that pain fosters a false sense of intimacy. Pain is a simulacrum of vulnerability, a hook in a young girl’s heart. Too often, the seed of some sad, sweet dream.

*Shortly after I handed in this essay, articles about Evan Rachel Wood's documentary Phoenix Rising included new abuse allegations surrounding the “Heart-Shaped Glasses” music video. “I was essentially raped on-camera,” she says. And, “No one was looking after me.” Rolling Stone reported a crew member at the video shoot corroborated her account, but Warner's lawyer once again denied all allegations.

Danielle Geller wrote a book (Dog Flowers, One World/Random House 2021) and regrets giving up her toy horses, especially that little gray colt.

DUSTIN luke nelson on the mountain goats’ “the sign”

Dustin bio