Two quick points:

• He didn't get breast augmentations.
• What you are presumably referring to (which was simply album cover art, not surgery) came after he was already extremely famous.

He sounded like he knew what he was talking about! :D

this is mostly in response to the OP

that's 3 questions, BTW

i think if people are unhinged enough to commit violence, I don't see how any MM video could "promote" it

influential people are usually politicians, religious leaders, actors and rock stars - the easily influenced are usually the feeble-minded

see my answer above

as for MM, i had a romance with him during Antichrist Superstar but i really couldn't stand his music these days, it's like a glam version of Nine Inch Nails

DO you care for NIN at all Il?

Form the albums of MM that I know of, his music just bored me to tears. I`ve also seen him a couple of times on British talk-shows thinking that he might be interesting in conversation. I normally ended up just nodding off or switching over.

oh such short memory you have, i told you i like Trent

reiterate that my fave NIN is With Teeth

I'd rather go to Cirque du Soleil to see strange visual things coupled with music than Manson expressing himself to me on stage. In terms of rock music, there has to be music to build upon with the image which I think Manson doesn't have, therefore his image comes off as baseless and hollow to me. Maynard James Keenan and Peter Gabriel have been known to dress in different ways on stage and yet the image never detracted from the music and didn't solely seek to build up the man (as I feel in the case of Manson) but only served to promote the music as you said above.

You give his fans too much credit. Unfortunately the multitudes in America (primarily young adults and teenagers) will pick up/download anything that looks cool or pisses off their superiors and only for that reason.

I don't feel that way. Manson's image is extremely calculated. Imagine the reaction from his fans if he all of a sudden dropped his image and came out on stage with no make up wearing only jeans and a t-shirt. As a point of reference, when Pantera dropped their 80's glam image in exchange for the one we all associate them with, I don't believe they did so in order to pander to a certain audience. In fact, I find that it was the other way around. Their years as a glam band were an effort to appeal to a trend that was hot at the time. When they just dressed like they normally would, I don't see how they could have been trying to appeal to anyone since metal was deemed dead by many in the early 90's pending the grunge explosion.

I said guards in prison don't treat the prisoners well. You don't need to have been there to know that. Regardless of whether it was jail or prison, guards in any type of correctional facility are known for inmate brutality. Had Manson avoided jail it wouldn't have been a problem in the first place. And if the events in jail bothered him so much (or actually happened), why didn't he pursue legal action against the detention officers? I'm sure he could afford a pricey lawyer to really stick it to the man.

Manson's no different from any minority out there. He's championed by many and also vilified by many for his image. He wasn't put in jail because he looks strange, he was put in there for another reason--sexual misconduct I'm guessing. It was only when he got to jail that he experienced physical opposition in regards to his image (allegedly). And as I stated above, guards aren't nice and cuddly. Just ask any black or hispanic inmate who happens to chance upon a bigoted guard and I'm sure they could relay stories much worse by way of pain than having to wash their face in toilet water.

I agree about the hollow and baseless image that MM has, it just basically concentrates itself around finding new ways to shock society through being crude and vulgar, and choosing which element of society he wants to annoy and cause a sensation with. The music is just an aggressive industrial sounding monotony which turns out to be just as hollow as his image.

Now take a real artist like Alice Cooper, now there was a true artist who really knew how to shock through well thought out theatrics and most importantly without the need to resort to the crude diatribe that MM churns out.

Basically MM should jack in the music business and go into starring in low budget horror flicks.:p:
,

too much intellectual debate about what is essentially vacuity disguised as something else

I really didn't care enough to fact check whether or not the breasts were real on the Mechanical Animals cover. The truth is that they were prosthetic so you got me on that one. But it still doesn't change what I said about his gimmick image being an attempt to sell records. Simply being famous doesn't sell you records either. Example: Aaron Carter. Yes, Aaron Carter. His 2000 album, Aaron's Party went three times platinum in the U.S. The following year he released Oh, Aaron which went platinum as well. In 2002 he released Another Earthquake which didn't even RIAA certify gold with a measly 60,000 some odd copies sold. I felt he was a good example because I remember him being all over the place in the early 2000's.