A record that looks like a children's toy and carries a warning to keep it away from children: that was the idea behind Smells Like Children, the first EP by the American industrial-metal band Marilyn Manson. On October 24, 1995, the release arrived on Nothing and Interscope Records, and within months it had gone platinum. It was never supposed to be an album at all.
From remix single to EP
The original plan was far smaller. The band's debut, Portrait of an American Family, had come out the year before, and the label wanted a remix single for one of its tracks, 'Dope Hat.' But the group, led by the singer Marilyn Manson, kept writing and recording during the tour behind that first album. Ideas piled up in Nothing Studios in New Orleans, with production from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, until a single became an EP.
One of those ideas changed everything. Manson decided to cover 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)' by Eurythmics after his first LSD trip, during which he imagined a slower, meaner version of the dance hit sung in his own voice. His label Nothing did not want to release the song as a single. It became the only single from the EP, and the video, directed by Dean Carr, went into heavy rotation on MTV. The surreal clips of Manson in a wedding dress, in a tutu on an empty street, and riding a pig through mud pulled the band into the mainstream.
The EP also carried two other covers: 'Rock N Roll Nigger' by Patti Smith and 'I Put a Spell on You' by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. These sat alongside reworked fragments of the band's own material and strange audio experiments. One track, 'Dancing with the One-Legged...', took its name from a broken pimp doll from the television series Starsky and Hutch, inside which the band hid drugs while on tour. The CD's rim carried the line 'Keep this and all drugs away from small children.' The track "White Trash" was an acoustic version of "Cake and Sodomy" performed by Tony Wiggins. Manson called it a redneck, ironic take on a song that criticizes southern Christian white poverty.
Film samples and the re-edited tracklist
Then the film samples became a problem. Early promo copies of Smells Like Children contained unauthorized clips from the movies Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Interscope refused to buy the licenses and demanded written consent from everyone involved. The tracklist had to be re-edited for the public release. Two tracks called 'Abuse, Part 1 (There is Pain Involved)' and 'Abuse, Part 2 (Confessions)' were replaced by 'The Hands of Small Children' and 'May Cause Discoloration of the Urine or Feces'. That second 'Abuse' track had included an interview with a teenage girl confessing to molesting her seven-year-old cousin.
The censorship did not quite work. Because of a pressing-plant error, several thousand copies of the original version with the deleted tracks were sent to radio stations and journalists as promos, and from there they leaked onto the internet. Manson had described the EP as an album that looks like it is for children but is not meant for children. The leaked version made that point more literally than anyone had planned.
The leaked version made that point more literally than anyone had planned.
Critics, sales and the platinum certificate
The reaction was loud. Critics mostly hated it: Entertainment Weekly gave the record a D, and Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it 'unmitigated consumer fraud.' But the public kept buying it, and the RIAA certified Smells Like Children platinum. The success of the 'Sweet Dreams' video earned a nomination for Best Rock Video at the MTV Video Music Awards.
Politicians soon joined the critics. On May 30, 1996, a bipartisan press conference attacked the music industry for selling 'prepackaged nihilism.' The activist K. Delores Tucker called Smells Like Children 'the dirtiest, nastiest porno record directed at children.' A group called Empower America announced a $25,000 radio campaign to collect signatures against the spread of what it called vicious, vulgar music. The accidental EP had become a national scandal.
Manson later wrote in his autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell that the record was a preface to an album about violence: sexual, domestic, drug-related, and psychological. But the tracks that reached stores on October 24, 1995 had already done the job. A remix single that grew into a platinum EP, a cover the label rejected, and a pressing error that leaked the version nobody was supposed to hear: Smells Like Children turned a touring shock-rock band into a name the whole country had to argue about.