The Antisocial Club (No Parents Allowed)
by Jon Pareles

Profanity? Check. Blasphemy? Check. Threats and imprecations? Check. Drug references? Check. Sex talk? Check. Distorted guitars? Check. Shouts, moans, growls? Check.

With those essentials and a little hysterical publicity, an ambitious rock band can be on its way to becoming the anointed anathema: the band that teenagers flaunt as a symbol of alienation while their parents worry enough to believe the worst. Just in time for back-to-school, two leading anathemas have released their latest albums: Marilyn Manson's "Mechanical Animals" and Korn's "Follow the Leader". And all interested parties - fans, adversaries, merchants, school officials, the news media - assume their appointed roles. Fans hunker down with the albums, learning lyrics so they can shout along when the band arrives on tour. (Korn's "Family Values Tour", a rap-metal package show that also includes the band Limp Bizkit and rapper Ice Cube, is due at the Continental Airlines Arena on Friday.) Groups dedicated to alarmism over youth culture trumpet their latest threat; some try to pressure local governments and promoters not to allow the bands to perform. This, in turn, helps the bands to position themselves as the bearers of harsh truths that the vested interests don't want the kids to hear. "I feel the parents hating me," Jonathan Davis sings in Korn's "Children of the Korn", before going on to declare, "All I want to do is live."

In a perversely symbiotic relationship, the stronger the adult opposition grows, the more the band becomes a so-called "lifestyle marketing" choice for rebellious teenagers. Spin magazine reports that some school districts have tried to ban Marilyn Manson and Korn t-shirts, and it's hard to imagine a better way to confer antifashion cachet. The t-shirt becomes more than a declaration of fandom: It's an announcement that the wearer has joined the antisocial club.

The roundelay of product-censoriousness-excitement-sales seems to keep all the parties perpetually satisfied. And by the time one crop of shocking bands is outgrown or burns out, a new one will have learned what buttons to push. "Hey, we love the abuse," Manson sings on the new album. "Because it makes us feel like we are needed."

Of course, it's hard to stay scandalous. When they finished their albums, neither Marilyn Manson nor Korn could have predicted that they would be on the market at a time when an independent counsel's investigation of the President would emerge in the form of Internet porn, available directly from the House of Representatives website or reprinted in the New York Times. Then again, it's been a long time since mere sexuality stirred up a rock controversy. The key to a full-fledged ruckus, as performers from Madonna to Manson have discovered, is baiting the religious right, which is both well organized and willing to believe the worst. Manson, of course, took full advantage with his "Antichrist Superstar" album in 1996; although the album sent out a tangle of messages about demagoguery, marketing, celebrity, belief, desperate ambition and general misanthropy, the band proudly capitalized on the reaction from people who assumed it was a straight-forward recruitment campaign for Satan.

"Mechanical Animals" takes a different turn. The music is an homage to mid-1970's David Bowie, though with advanced distortion devices to make the instruments bite harder; in well-made songs, the band also lifts ideas from Iggy Pop, the Knack and Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey". In some songs, Manson's lyrics also revive Bowie's old imagery of outer space as the refuge of the alienated. Knowing that he'll get noticed, Manson also comes up with titles like "The Dope Show" and "I Don't Like the Drugs (but the Drugs Like Me)". But he sings that the drugs are numbing and dehumanizing, one more consumer product to distract him and dull the only feeling he knows is real: pain. This time around, Manson is Holden Caulfield with face paint and lipstick, bitterly denouncing the phoniness that he feels himself being pulled into: "Sell us ersatz, dressed up and real fake/Anything to belong." The anathema bands depend on teenage frustration and rage; it's their artistic inspiration as well as their livelihood. But while the feeling is perennial, its musical outlet has gone through a sea-change. In the 1980's, antisocial club t-shirts touted thrash-metal bands like Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer. Faced with what they saw as deadly, soul-crushing forces - state and parental authority, random violence, conformity - thrash bands wrote songs from the perspective of those malevolent forces; their narrators were Death or nuclear annihilation or totalitarianism itself, so the songs transmuted fear into power.

The newer bands aren't so invincible. Consciously or not, they have taken their strategy from Bill Clinton: They feel your pain, or at least a lot of their own. They are abject figures, more victims than brutes, which makes them feel entitled to lash out everywhere. For all their free-floating hostility, they are disgusted as much with themselves as with the world; they are freaks and misfits, not all-conquering demons. For his new album cover, Manson has been photographed as a neutered androgynous nude, with false nipple-less breasts, a nondescript genital bulge and six fingers on each hand. Davis is just disheveled; Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, as a guest rapper on Korn's "All in the Family", mocks Davis for "doing all you can to look like Raggedy Ann." While learning self-deprecation from alternative rock and grunge, these bands have absorbed hip-hop's willingness to blurt everything out. Add power chords, and the result is music that blasts its confusion to the cheapest arena seats. Attitude, impact and irritation-value matter as much as music, which is why Korn have gotten away with re-writing a handful of tunes again and again. Korn has a choppy, clanky funk mode, a power-chord mode and a dissonant-riff mode; Davis tends to start out with a choked-up haggard voice and build up to thrash-metal growls. The character he has built up through Korn's three albums is a mess, seething with old injuries and unstable enough to cause new ones. He's wrestling with self-hatred, violent impulses, parental expectations and a confused sexual identity that has him lurching between homophobia and gay fantasies; one unlovely song, "My Gift to You", has him strangling his girlfriend during sex. He isn't boasting about his troubles, though; his tone is desperate and sometimes pathetic, more like a therapy case than a cult leader.

Such nuances won't matter to outsiders. Manson sings about drugs and tosses off lines like "as hollow as the 'O' in God"; Korn's songs veer from insubordination to insecurity to murderous fantasies, all in the name of what the historian Ann Douglas calls "terrible honesty", the determination to tell the whole truth no matter how brutal. Shock value makes these bands commercial and tabloid-ready. But for the fans, the pain and insecurity make the music seem real.