Post-industrial gothic punk 'n' roll on Route 666: Labeling theory, moral crusades and Marilyn Manson's Dead to the World Tour

This dissertation examines the events surrounding Marilyn Manson's Dead to the World Tour of 1996--1997 through the lenses of Labeling Theory and Cultural Criminology. Utilising news coverage of the tour from the mainstream and music press, as well as the discourses of the band's detractors from conference transcripts, hearings, public relations announcements and Internet sites, this dissertation illustrates that the deviant/criminal status of Marilyn Manson is a socially constructed label resulting from a carefully orchestrated and well organised campaign by moral entrepreneurs of the American political and Religious Right.; Moral entrepreneurs orchestrated and sustained a rigorous moral crusade between late 1996 and late 1997. The leadership of organisations such as Empower America and the American Family Association constituted the strategic architects of anti-Marilyn Manson moral crusade. Presenting themselves as the front-line officers of the culture wars, they utilised several mass media forms and a network of loosely connected politically conservative and Christian Right organisations to enlist the aid of local politicians and religious leaders in mobilising their constituencies as soldiers of the anti-Marilyn Manson moral crusade. By interweaving factual information about the band with misinterpretation, innuendo, speculation, and outright fabrication, moral entrepreneurs constructed an anti-Marilyn Manson discourse and marshalled considerable public opposition to the band. Ultimately, by disseminating this discourse and employing, legalistic and administrative mechanisms with local community support, moral crusaders applied a variety of deviant/criminal labels such as "antifamily values", "sexually perverted" and "satanic" and the concomitant social and legal sanctions to Marilyn Manson in an attempt to discredit and silence the band's counterhegemonic messages.