About “The Beautiful People”

Marilyn Manson’s first original hit after the cover of “Sweet Dreams.” The song is preceded with a few seconds of backward-guitar feedback and electronic noise. It includes a heavily distorted spoken sample by Tex Watson, declaring “We would swoop down on the town and kill everyone that wasn’t beautiful.”

Lyrically, it is intertwined with 1996’s Antichrist Superstar overarching theme, a semi-narrative examination of the Nietzschean Übermensch. Within this context, “The Beautiful People” deals explicitly with the destructive manifestation of the Will to Power, while also exploring Nietzsche’s view of master-slave morality, particularly the concept’s connection with Social Darwinism and its relation to various political and economic systems such as capitalism and fascism.