The final track on
Marilyn Manson's
Mechanical Animals album, and a near-perfect song to end on. It keeps to the album's overall themes of drugs and the loss of
innocence and
emotion and brings them to a
climax - the lyrics and the
sound of the song combine to give an impression of complete
solitude and hopelessness.
The song is somewhat heavier and more guitar-led than the softest songs on the album, but not with the rhythmic glam feel of songs like I Don't Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me) or Rock is dead.
There was a time when, had I been asked to name the greatest song ever written, it would have been this one. I would, I think, have been wrong, but that was the kind of impression it made when I first heard it, at the end of the first album I ever bought that made me realise that music existed which could not just make you dance or make you friends but make you cry because you had found something truly, tragically beautiful. The rest of the album stunned me, and then Coma White came round, and I saw, quite clearly, the dead, icy landscape and the song's 'she', alone and watching. It wasn't a new image; I had always imagined desolate, post-apocalyptic landscapes, but it was the first time in a lifetime where my musical exposure was limited to folk (first loved and then renounced as 'not cool' when my friends laughed at it) and the pop that I adopted because, well, everyone else liked it, that anything had put the images into music. I spent the next three hours with the song on repeat, immersing myself in it.
Now, I would be unlikely to decree the song or the album 'the best ever made' these days - among other things, Marilyn's voice has an annoying quality in quieter songs that spoils it a little. But I still return to it from time to time and it's still worth listening to. A recommendation.
Coma White was released as a promotional single in the US in 1999.
Lyrics:
There's something cold and blank behind her smile
She's standing on an overpass
In her miracle mile
You were from a perfect world
A world that threw me away today
Today to run away
A pill to make you numb
A pill to make you dumb
A pill to make you anybody else
But all the drugs in this world
Won't save her from herself
Her mouth was an empty cut
And she was waiting to fall
Just bleeding like a polaroid that
Lost all her dolls
You were from a perfect world
A world that threw me away today
Today to run away
A pill to make you numb
A pill to make you dumb
A pill to make you anybody else
But all the drugs in this world
Won't save her from herself