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I just liked him because he was shocking or whatever. I went to high school pretty close to Columbine, I even remember the day it happened - cops were all over our school, some with guns in hand. It was just stupid. He was unnecessarily blamed for it, along with KMFDM, et al. I wasn't that I actually harboured homicidal fantasies in the least, it's just that an impressionable teenager is naturally attracted to subversive things, things that they do not want to you to see, to hear.
But in the end, though I appreciated his music and image greatly, I had no idea what sort of subtext he was incorporating into his art. Mechanical Animals was kind of a Bowie tribute conglomeration, sampling from all sorts of time frames of rock music (Paul McCartney and Wings, etc.) and was maybe the beginning of his paranoid, drug-fueled self demise. Utterly on purpose, the crazy fuck. The alchemical significance of Antichrist Superstar would have to wait until I was older, but now I know he is one of the most significant figures of the 1990s, history will just take its sweet time, as it does, to catch up with him.
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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