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Mr Manson is a genius. Now, now, before you all accuse me of being a great big goth: this is not based on my having a shrine to him at the back of my wardrobe and spending hours crying to myself over it at how the world doesn't understand my soul and my life is, to quote Johnen Vasquez, "a dark pit of darkness."

I live in a Victorian seafront terrace, anything in the back of the wardrobe would go completely moldy and I've got some perfectly good reasons to call him a genius; he's a master of effective schlock pantomime but people tend to forget that that's not actually the point, that's just the equivalent of Paris Hilton having a problem keeping her dress up in terms of getting attention. At the end of the day, it's been over twenty years since Ozzy started biting heads off bats and if we're still shocked by a man in make up, it's an easy enough way to get people to look at you.

So, no, it's not the shock-factor that makes him a genius, that just means people are still easily surprised. It's the fact he can approach what are often really quite heavy topics (social exclusion, suicide, violence as a fashion) without getting preachy and indeed, makes some extremely clever points a lot of the time, albeit hidden amongst some glammy stomp-rock. And maybe I'm wrong but I can't help thinking a lot of it's very tongue-in-cheek, not least because if you ask most people about the man, it's very obvious they haven't really listened to the music.

He's done the issue of sex before and a lot of his music has something of the same effect as McFly getting naked on people (some repulsed, many thrilled) but with this new song, following his divorce from Dita Von Teese and subsequent hook-up with nineteen-year-old Evan Rachel Wood, (Mazza is nearly forty) it's a tricky line to tread without the creepiness suddenly spilling over from just being a part of the show to something a lot less wholesome. Calling it 'Heart Shaped Glasses,' one of the most iconic pieces of imagery from the controversial film (of Vladimir Nabokov's book about older men liking younger girls) 'Lolita,' is the sort of thing that, for many people, crosses that line and then keeps on going straight into 'flat-out wrong'.

Though, to be fair, she's not a child and I know enough people of at least my parents' generation who are married to a partner twenty years older than them that it's unfair to liken the relationship to paedophilia. Here we are, then, at the song; a cutesy, prim tune clashing to sinister effect with Manson's voice and it's all designed to make your skin crawl, to draw the deliberate (and unnecessary) Lolita parallel. It's the softest, most pop thing he's done in years, if not ever and yet it's also the scariest by miles. It's playful and dark and there's something about it that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, as though you shouldn't be listening to it (naturally the video is far to ripe for us to feature here).

Yet with sexed-up schoolgirl uniforms a music video staple and young girls like JoJo wearing disturbingly revealing outfits or singing about pretty adult themes without too many eyelids blinking, it would seem unfair to suddenly turn on Marilyn Manson for this, when it's presumably just a play on the reaction to his new rel! ationship, just because he's an easy target.

Fortunately (or perhaps not) it's catchy enough that it'll probably get accepted as just another bit of gothery but the real appeal, I think, lies in how unsettling and (frankly) disturbing the imagery and implications are. Whether you think it's in good taste or not, this is what the whole point's meant to be and I assume he's still got his irony lipstick on, too.

Download: Out now
CD Released: May 28th

(Hazel Robinson)