Marilyn Manson

Manson didn't just cite David Bowie as an inspiration — he'd secretly been rehearsing him for years. When outlaw-country singer Shooter Jennings asked him to sing Bowie's "Cat People" for a Giorgio Moroder tribute album, Manson didn't need convincing: "I sing that song every night before I go onstage," he told Jennings. "That's my song I warm up to." They cut the vocal in one take at three in the morning. Manson had already borrowed Bowie's glam-alien silhouette for 1998's Mechanical Animals; the cover just made the debt explicit.

listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — The Music That Made Me (David Bowie and Alice Cooper testimony) ↗share

1982

Cat People (Putting Out Fire)David Bowie

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2016

Cat People (Putting Out Fire)Marilyn Manson

listen forBowie's 1982 version glides on a serpentine bassline and his own cool, detached delivery, written with producer Giorgio Moroder for Paul Schrader's horror film Cat People. On the 2016 Shooter Jennings recording, Manson sings that same lyric over a stomping piano and eerie country fiddle, turning Bowie's clipped menace into a rasped, theatrical growl — an actual vocal take from the artist himself, not a soundalike.

Trent Reznor discovered Manson playing in Florida, signed him to his own Nothing Records, and produced Portrait of an American Family, Smells Like Children, and 1996's Antichrist Superstar — the run that made Manson's name. Asked years later, after a long rift, whether he'd work with Reznor again, Manson didn't hedge: "He taught me a lot of what I know about music." The two had fallen out and reconciled, Manson said, after an HBO documentary about Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine reminded Reznor of what they'd once built together.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1989

Head Like a HoleNine Inch Nails

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1996

The Beautiful PeopleMarilyn Manson

listen forNIN's 1989 Head Like a Hole grinds distorted synths and mechanical, gated drums into a tightly sequenced groove that snaps into a defiant, screamed hook. Manson's producer-mentor imprint shows directly on 1996's The Beautiful People, built from the same industrial toolkit: a lurching, machine-tight rhythm section detonating into a shouted, fist-in-the-air chorus that turns Reznor's cold precision into arena-size aggression.

Manson's mother, a Neil Diamond and Bee Gees fan, also owned Alice Cooper records, and one song stuck. "I could identify with it," Manson said of 1971's "I'm Eighteen." "It felt true, and it will always be true." Years later, touring together on 2013's Masters of Madness tour, he finally got to sing it onstage with Cooper — "a childhood dream come true," he called it. Cooper returned the admiration, recalling the first time he saw Manson perform: "Finally, somebody doing something interesting."

listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — Sympathy for the Devil (bio, Alice Cooper/Kiss comparison, backward-masking seminars) ↗share

1972

School's OutAlice Cooper

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2003

mOBSCENEMarilyn Manson

listen forCooper's 1972 School's Out marches a taunting, singalong hook — a children's chorus chanting the title — over a swaggering hard-rock riff built for a stadium to shout back. Manson's 2003 mOBSCENE does the same job with a different toolkit: a stomping, chant-ready chorus and cheerleader-style backing vocals riding a glammed-up, industrial-tinged strut, the shock-rock formula Cooper originated updated with a dance-club sheen.