Marilyn Manson may have buried the hatchet with Billy Corgan and Courtney Love, but his latest comments on grunge music might ruffle a few feathers and instigate a whole other world of controversy. In a new interview, the industrial rocker claims he was the first person to coin the term “grunge.” No word about pop music or spray cheese, though.

The topic came up during a conversation about Manson’s early years in the music industry when he still worked as a journalist. When he first began writing, he “hated rock ‘n’ roll,” explaining that it “was on the cusp of grunge and a lot of bands that I used to call ‘commonist rock’ because everyone wanted to be like the common man with the flannel shirts and Pearl Jam and their fight against Ticketmaster and all this horse shit.”



That’s when he made the big reveal, saying, “Nirvana was different. That was one of the bands I covered first as a journalist and I’m just going to go ahead and say I coined the term ‘grunge’ in a review of Bleach. You’re welcome.”

Mark Arm, frontman for the Seattle bands Green River and Mudhoney, has long been credited with the invention of the word “grunge” as a genre, first using it in a 1981 letter to Seattle fan zine Desperate Times. However, he’s since admitted that he “got it from someone else.” Perhaps that “someone” is Manson?

Read Manson’s full Q&A with Noisey here. His new album, The Pale Emperor, is due out on January 20th and is currently streaming in full.