The Beautiful People (Marilyn Manson song)
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| Single by Marilyn Manson | ||||||||
| from the album Antichrist Superstar | ||||||||
| Released | September 22, 1996 | |||||||
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| Recorded | New Orleans, Louisiana, 1996 | |||||||
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| Length | 3:45 | |||||||
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| Marilyn Manson singles chronology | ||||||||
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"The Beautiful People" is a song by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released as the lead single from the band's second studio album, Antichrist Superstar in September 1996. Classified as alternative metal, the song was written by frontman Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez, and was produced by Trent Reznor, Dave Ogilvie and Manson. Lyrically, it discusses what Manson refers to as "the culture of beauty".
The single peaked at number 26 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and remains known as one of Marilyn Manson's most famous and most successful original songs; in a 2004 review, Richard Banks of the BBC called the track "still the most impressive" in the band's catalogue, and in 2006 it was ranked at number 28 on VH1's 40 Greatest Metal Songs.
"The Beautiful People" was written in 1994, with lyrics by Marilyn Manson and music by Twiggy Ramirez. The original demo version was written in a hotel room while on tour, and recorded to four-track by Manson, Ramirez, and drummer Ginger Fish. Manson recalled to Kerrang! magazine in May 2005: "It was somewhere in the South, which is ironic. I remember playing the drum beat on the floor and then having my drummer duplicate that on the drum machine. It happened in one day pretty much".
The title of the song comes from Marilyn Bender's 1967 book The Beautiful People, which exposed the world of scandal within the "jet-set" lifestyle of the 1960s, and the culture of beauty as it pertained to fashion and politics. The phrase itself was popularized by Vogue magazine in the early 1960s and was particularly used to describe the Kennedy family, a frequent source of inspiration in Marilyn Manson's work.
The song is preceded with a few seconds of backwards-guitar feedback and electronic noise. It includes a heavily distorted spoken sample by Tex Watson, declaring "[We would] swoop down on the town. . . [and] kill everyone that wasn't beautiful".
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