There have been historical moments when Manson art erupted into special significance and carried a particularly noteworthy level of cultural baggage. 1974 was the first of those moments, both for works directly about Manson and for works shaped by the influence of the Family. This was the year of Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, of course, as well as numerous other major works marbled with Manson: Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, John Waters’s Female Trouble, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Neil Young’s “Revolution Blues,” and Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers.
Zachary Lazar refers to the stories he plumbs in Sway—the interconnected lives of the Rolling Stones and their entourage, experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charles Manson—as “contemporary folklore.” As with other folkloric motifs, themes, and characters, the material offered up by the Manson Family is ductile and usually articulated in the subjunctive mood; Manson art tends to suggest “what if” possibilities rather than “must be” conclusions.3 While there have been, of course, numerous realist narratives inspired by Manson and his followers (the Helter Skelter book and miniseries are likely the most influential here) most “Manson art” is organized around feeling rather than argument; hints, winks, and feints, rather than linear narration. There is also a minor tradition of meta-Manson art, which itself reflects on the ubiquity of Manson in artistic expression. Here, for instance, we find Leonard Cohen’s post–Cold War song, “The Future,” (1992) which evokes the barren cultural landscape of its moment by making reference to all of the failed writers who think they can upset cultural norms by imitating Manson.
Perhaps most explicit in its attempt to comment on the omnipresence of Manson imagery itself is street artist Banksy’s portrait of Charles Manson hitchhiking while holding a sign that reads, simply, “Anywhere.” Originally located on a corner wall near the Archway tube station in London, Banksy’s work denotes something about Manson as an actual figure. He is wearing his prison uniform and chain, and is looking to pick up any ride he can get. He might have ended up in your town in 1967 when he was released from prison! (Except he didn’t. Unless he did.) The real power of Banksy’s image and text, given his characteristic stencil presentation on a public wall, comes on the level of suggestion—that Manson’s iconic power has remarkable spatial reach and cultural depth. Banksy’s Manson, with his too-smudged-to-read prison number, his “anywhere” sign, and his surprising resemblance to the Che Guevara of T-shirt fame, is not an easy image to interpret—maybe a heroic revolutionary, maybe a scary serial killer, maybe just the No Name Maddox of his birth certificate. This is, in essence, Banksy’s visual translation of Mojo Nixon’s 1987 song “Elvis Is Everywhere,” which at once insists upon and undercuts the power of the star’s cultural presence. For all of the fun Mojo Nixon has with Elvis, the payoff is always the same—Elvis is the King.4
Bansky’s consequential revision—trading “everywhere” for “anywhere”—acts as a reminder that Manson’s assault on the culture was less frontal, less direct, than was the triumph of Elvis Presley. When Andy Warhol silk-screened eight Elvises in 1963, he borrowed an image of the singer and actor taken from the movie Flaming Star, which has the King pointing his gun right at us. Banksy’s Manson, on the other hand, makes his impact by stealth—the “anywhere” tag is a reminder of how terrifying the creepy crawl really is. Manson and his minions might in fact be anywhere—in the music the children are listening to, in the blood on the walls of too many horror movies to count, in your house while you sleep. While those responsible for these Los Angeles murders of 1969 might have been put behind bars, in some more diffuse culture sense the killer is still on the road.
Manson art travels. It moves from genre to genre, jumps around in time and space, and climbs up and down from pulp to highbrow with stops at all the levels in between. Even a simple (and very partial) roll call of artists who have in some way participated in making “Manson art” tells a story of remarkable cultural breadth and investment: Banksy, Leonard Cohen, Zachary Lazar, N.W.A., Thomas Pynchon, Sonic Youth, Paul Schrader, John Cale, Raymond Pettibon, Joan Didion, Devendra Banhart, John Waters, Joe Coleman, the Ramones, Akrobatik, Steven Soderbergh, Lana Del Rey, Joyce Carol Oates, Jim Carroll, Richard Schechner, Eminem, Brian De Palma, the Lemonheads, Wes Craven, Lil’ Kim, the Pixies, Don McLean, John Moran, Cady Noland, Neil Young, James Ellroy, Death Grips, Jerzy Kosinski, the Flaming Lips, Stephen Sondheim, Killer Mike, Joachim Koester, Nine Inch Nails, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Negativland. In Mexican professional wrestling (Lucha Libre) there are at least three distinct figures using the cult leader’s name—Charly Manson, Charly Manson, Jr., and mini-Charly Manson.
Drive-by citations of Manson often seem slight, but still manage to be saturated with class and regional bias (recall comedian Robin Williams’s oft-repeated line about people who live below the “Manson-Nixon line”).5 Sometimes invocations of the demon Manson do not seem to add up to much at all. For instance in the first season of American Horror Story, a television anthology series, a number of Manson “signs” are deployed, none more obvious than the fact that it features a main character in Southern California named Tate Langdon (yes, that gets the first six letters of “Tate-LaBianca” doesn’t it?); in case we don’t get the scary joke of his name right away, we also find him whispering “Helter Skelter” just after planning a murder. As the series progressed and a robust fan culture developed around the show, its producers encouraged speculation about whether an entire upcoming season would be devoted to Manson and his Family.6
The artists listed above—and others I did not mention who “use” Manson—work in opera, horror film, rap, television animation, reggae, literary and genre fiction, immersive theater, various subgenres of indie and punk rock, musical theater, photography, and in what the Internet Movie Database dubs “Hippie Exploitation and Manson Family Inspired Films.” They are cultural traditionalists and cut-and-paste renegades. They are avatars of the avant-garde and creators of kitsch (and in the case of at least one—John Waters—both). They invoke Manson to reanimate old ideas about “the end of the sixties” and to challenge received notions about whether there ever was such a thing as the “sixties” that could have a distinct beginning or end point. The creators of Manson art treat the cult leader and his Family with derision and with respect. If Manson has served as a tool for countless artists since 1969, then it’s as a hammer—used equally to break and to build. The art world’s Manson is sometimes the applecart and sometimes what tips the applecart over.
Before we get any further into the terrain of Manson art, I need to make it clear that the cult leader has been particularly overrepresented in a few genres of popular music including heavy metal, hip hop, and various subgenres generally discussed under the more general rubric of hardcore (including horror hardcore). My list above of artists engaging with Manson Family lore and sounds would be truly unwieldy if I tried to include all relevant actors. The use of Charles Manson and the Family in popular music falls into a few major categories: drive-by invocations of his name as efficient intensifier (of horror, domination, and so on), samples of his many jailhouse interviews, lyrical or musical references to actual Manson Family recordings, chronicles of the actual events of 1969, and jokes. Hip-hop shout-outs to Manson regularly use the cult leader as a hashtag of sorts to index masculine power—usually either in the rapper’s ability to control women or triumph over other rappers. We find such application of Manson’s name in Lil Wayne’s “Trap House,” Das Efx’s “Here It Is,” N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton,” Akinyele’s “Messin’ with My Cru,” and even the Fresh Prince’s “Trapped on the Dance Floor.” In some ways the video for Lana Del Rey’s “Freak” treads similar shout-out ground, including as it does an appearance by Father John Misty doing a sort of vague Manson impression. After collecting Manson references in the hip-hop sphere for some years, I can report that one of the only truly surprising conclusions I have come to is that the Wu-Tang Clan appears not to have made lyrical reference t
o the cult leader; it is comforting to discover that at least one member (Raekwon) has done so on a solo project, one (Method Man) has appeared on a track with the Manson-inspired duo Heltah Skeltah, and the Clan’s official website does boast a fairly lively “Charles Manson Appreciation Thread.” (Of course no act has been as dogged in its use of Mansonabilia as the Memphis collective that imaginatively named itself Manson Family. The Manson Family has one record called Heltah Skeltah and one called Blood on the Wall.)
The interviews Manson has given over the decades have also provided a rich body of material, not only in hip hop but in heavy metal and hardcore as well. Here I will mention Jedi Mind Tricks, Dragonland, and Flatbush Zombies to represent the many artists who make this move. Particularly popular on this front are samples of Manson dramatic monologue that includes the lines “I make the money / I roll the nickels / The game is mine” (reproduced in Death Grips’s “Beware” for instance). Manson’s “maybe I should have killed four, five hundred” speech also appears in popular song relatively often. It is common when discussing the use of sampling in hip hop and other forms of contemporary music to emphasize that this form of quotation can carry a whole range of possible meanings and can be used for a variety of artistic purposes, and the Manson samples are no exception. Often he is made to sound flat-out crazy and is used to intensify a tale of danger or terror. But here and there the speech samples make Manson sound thoughtful, funny, and even prophetic.
References to, and samples of, actual Manson musical productions are less common but bespeak what is perhaps a deeper engagement with the history in question. Here I am thinking of the double-dipping Denver rap group Krookid Hooks, who not only title their song “Love and Terror” (a reference to both the Life magazine cover about the Family and the Manson Family record released in 1970) but also includes a sample of the Family singing “I’ll Never Say Never to Always.” The mentions and samples of Manson music act as a sort of cultural high-sign, an expression meant to connect artist and audience through their shared obsession with the case. Songs by the Flaming Lips, Throbbing Gristle, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre that invoke Manson’s music make no sense unless we assume that listeners will, on some level, get the references to “Cease to Exist,” “Arkansas,” and so on. And in the case of Brian Jonestown Massacre, of course, listeners also have to appreciate the extracurricular frisson built into the phenomenon of this band named for one California cult leader revisiting the music of another California cult leader.
Even more arcane lyrical references to the murders and life with the Family go well beyond the plausibly visible high-sign into the realm of the cryptograph. When mathcore band Car Bomb works a mention of Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist into a song called “Cielo Drive” or metal act Superjoint Ritual (with Hank Williams III on bass) includes a reference to Manson’s slippies-hippies distinction into its song “Creepy Crawl,” it is clear that we are being asked to recognize relatively deep Manson lore.7 This is artistic work created by Manson Family insiders for other insiders; among other goals, the work seems organized around creating something like a musical language of recognition—a sort of Manson vernacular. This deep lore is certainly hovering in the background of rapper Nicki Minaj’s character “Roman Zolanski”—an alter-ego whose development has unfolded in various songs of hers (and on the records of other artists including Kanye West). Perhaps the funniest moment in this ongoing tale comes in the song “Stupid Hoe” when the rapper, in character as the gay man Roman Zolanski, insists that there is no connection between Zolanski and Polanski. And speaking of deep lore, it seems not coincidental that a television program debuting in 1976 that featured an “invisible boss”—an older and powerful man giving orders to three young women working as private investigators—was called Charlie’s Angels. As psychiatrist Clara Livesey has written, the basic premise of the show “seems like a parody . . . of the other Charlie.”8
Playwright Erik Forrest Jackson working with the Theatre Couture company in the mid-1990s noticed the “preponderance” of Charlies on the scene in the late 1960s and 1970s and so created a theater piece that involved the Angels’ Charlie, Manson, the Star-Kist Tuna, Revlon’s Charlie perfume, and more. (Conspiracy theorists will want to take note of the fact that on the television show one of the Angels was played, in a later season, by Shelly Hack, who was best known for being the advertising “face” of Revlon’s perfume.) Jackson’s Charlie! was a surprise hit, drawing “listening room” only crowds for months and garnering a positive review from Ben Brantley at The New York Times. After the initial run and a change in venues, the creators received a cease-and-desist order from Columbia TriStar, who controlled the rights to Charlie’s Angels and who were likely displeased by the drag aspect of the show (it featured Sherry Vine, Justin Vivian Bond, and Candis Cayne, among others) and by its conclusion that the “Charlie” giving the three detectives their orders by remote control was Manson himself.
The show was, on the face of it, a raucous entertainment. It is full of sly puns and plenty of very broad winks from the performers to the audience, community-building rooted in shared popular cultural reference points. The actors were in glamorous gowns and upheld the drag tradition of calling attention to surfaces and offering what seemed to be ephemeral moments of pleasure. But there was, as Jackson has explained, some serious business going just below the surface of the hilarity. Jackson’s script was intended as a feminist provocation and tool of empowerment, an effort, essentially to defuse the power of these particular icons of the patriarchy as well as the less visible but no less pernicious effects of corporation like Revlon, who profit largely through the marketing of narrow ideals of female beauty. Theatre Couture’s camp performance of Charlie! draws on the assumption that the juxtaposition between the hilarity of the performance and the quite serious content lurking just below the surfaces would be accessible to audiences who were meant to take in the play’s claims about male dominance in the counterculture and the corporate commodification of women.
Charlie! was serious play. It was a instance of what I am calling “deep Manson lore,” which has to be distinguished from the frequent use of horrifying details—especially in music—of the case in what might be called (after film critic David Edelstein’s coinage) “musical torture porn.” These songs obsessively focus on Sharon Tate’s body, blood, and fetus and operate in an explicitly misogynist context. Without endorsing the position taken by the family of Sharon Tate that virtually any artistic representation of her life or death is on the face of it exploitative, it is clear that musical reenactments of her murder (by Righteous Pigs and others) bring little to the conversation apart from a sort of sophomoric shock-the-squares agenda. Ultimately the joke songs that mention Manson carry much more artistic weight—largely because they tend to serve as metacommentary on overinvestment in Manson as a figure of horror. At least two of these songs (the Mr. T Experience’s “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend” and the Angry Samoans “They Saved Hitler’s Cock”) up the rhetorical ante with invocations of the Führer. My larger point is that the landscape of Manson art is defined both by thematically and generically organized collections of popular artistic expression and by individual works of greater depth and breadth.
Bridging the gap between these poles of artistic activity is the post-Manson life of the song “Helter Skelter,” which I mentioned briefly in connection with U2’s version of it at the start of the previous section. I will only discuss the song briefly here, not because it does not merit sustained attention but because that work has largely been done already by Gerald Carlin and Mark Jones in an essay they published in 2012. In their careful genealogy of the continued life of this song (in cover versions, samples, lyrical references, and so on), Carlin and Jones demonstrate that by the mid-1970s or so it was impossible to perform “Helter Skelter” “without Manson’s shadow falling over its performance or reception; in the battle for the legacy of the 1960s countercultural project, ‘Helter Skelter’ had become ammunition.”9 Fr
om a 1970s cover version by the Ramrods, a Detroit rock band who performed it together with the Who’s “My Generation” and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” (thus, according to Carlin and Jones, retroactively placing it “into a genealogy of youth rebellion and punk attitude”), to Mighty Sphincter’s mid-1980s deathrock version, to the regular sampling of it in more recent days, “Helter Skelter” has carried a remarkable amount of cultural baggage. One synth-goth band not only covered the song, but ended its performance with a sample of the Family itself singing “I’ll Never Say Never to Always.”10 In short, when U2’s Bono accused Charles Manson of “stealing” “Helter Skelter” from the Beatles, he neglected to mention how much help the cult leader had! Manson art depends on Charlie and the Family, but most of its work has been done outside their control.
One recent major example of Manson art, the thirteen-episode first season of the television show Aquarius (2015) represents perhaps the most promiscuous deployment of Charles Manson to date. Manson does not build Stonehenge in Aquarius, but he does live at the heart of a web connecting up a truly astounding range of political, cultural, and community actors in and around 1960s Los Angeles. Aquarius rereads Manson’s time in Los Angeles as a postscript or aftershock. The series begins in 1967, from the premise that if Manson ended up playing such a major role in Southern California life in 1969, then he must have begun to make his presence felt much earlier. Aquarius is, to put the matter in the vernacular, a hot mess—but it is a meaningful hot mess. This television series attempts to measure just how much ground Manson and his Family creepy crawled over beginning in the second half of the 1960s. Aquarius wants above all to frame Manson (as defense lawyer Paul Fitzgerald put it) as “some sort of right-wing hippie.”11 If Fitzgerald’s description (an analogue to the “acid fascism” framed out by David Dalton and David Felton) has a baffled tone of unforeseen discovery, Aquarius quite audaciously makes “right-wing hippie” a literal fact: the origin story of Aquarius is organized around the revelation that Manson has for years been in bed with Ken Karn (the “KK” of his name meant to evoke both the KKK and “RR”—Ronald Reagan), a Republican lawyer and fundraiser who hopes to take a position as California finance chief for Nixon’s 1968 campaign. Virtually all of the action involving Manson in this show traces back to Manson’s late 1950s relationship with Karn, which apparently stretched the definition of attorney–client privilege to include lots of desperate sex.
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