Background
The album's title is a takeoff on Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1971 musical Jesus Christ Superstar. Similarly, the record is a rock opera which, in an issue of Kerrang! magazine edited by the band's frontman, is stated as a tribute to—and inspired by—the works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
After the release of Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death), Marilyn Manson divulged that his concept album trilogy is an autobiographical story told in a reverse timeline (chronologically reverse from their actual release dates). That means Holy Wood opens the storyline followed by Mechanical Animals and concludes with Antichrist Superstar. Furthermore, though Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals made sense as individual concept albums on their own, there was a hidden overarching story running through the three releases.
Read more about this topic: Antichrist Superstar
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)