Everything Marilyn Manson is doing has been done before, much of it better. But just as the entertainment industry likes to jump on bandwagons, so do city councils, parents' groups and church organizations. And Marilyn Manson happens to be the bandwagon of the moment.

In the past it's been risque rhythm-and-blues songs like ''Work With Me Annie,'' Elvis's pelvis, heavy metal lyrics played backward and 2 Live Crew. Now it's a 27-year-old who thinks of himself as an Antichrist. In actuality, he is a bogeyman in reverse. Children use him to scare their parents. Then their parents use him to scare other parents. And it seems to be working.

Hundreds of bands are making music that's just as parent-unfriendly as Marilyn Manson's. But they are not selling more than a million records, getting played on the radio and leaping to the top of the pop charts, as this group has. So in the name of children, church groups, legislators and parents' organizations mobilized to quash suggestive images, words and ideas. And children have become one of the greatest silent cultural forces in the United States, never speaking but always spoken for.

On the surface, there would seem to be a continuity between Marilyn Manson and some of the rebel cultural figures of the past, like Lenny Bruce, who was arrested for using dirty words in comedy clubs in the early '60's. But there is a difference. Lenny Bruce broke barriers. Marilyn Mason does not. The reactions to the band are part of a bigger picture in which a conjunction of forces in society is trying to sew up the curtain of permissibility that the counterculture tore open in the late 1960's. It's not just the Marilyn Manson furor: it's the new television-content rating system, the coming of the V-chip, the Communications Decency Act regulating Internet content, stickers on records warning of ''explicit lyrics'' and, on the social level, the limitations political correctness has put on speech and scholarship. It's also the increasing acquiescence of art and entertainment to the demands of television advertisers and chain stores like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster.

A simpler view would be to look at it as an age-old publicity stunt. Those protesting his music get their name in the news as moral guardians, while the band gets its name in the news as dangerous and powerful disrupters of decency (one of rock's greatest aspirations).

But in the process, it's harder for Marilyn Manson to make music or perform as it is transformed from a rock group to a political issue. In 1990, 2 Live Crew stood trial in Florida on obscenity charges. The band made front-page news and became a First Amendment cause celebre. The group won its case, but by the end of the strenuous legal process it had also broken up.