The Beautiful People
by Marilyn Manson
- 144
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 63
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Twiggy Ramirez wrote the music and Marilyn Manson the lyrics for "The Beautiful People" in 1994, in a hotel room while the band was on tour. Manson, Ramirez and drummer Ginger Fish recorded the demo to four-track. Manson later told Kerrang! that he played the drum beat on the floor and had his drummer duplicate it on a drum machine, and that it happened in one day, somewhere in the South.
The song came out in September 1996 as the lead single from the American rock band's second studio album, Antichrist Superstar, produced by Trent Reznor, Dave Ogilvie and Manson. Its title came from Marylin Bender's 1967 book about the scandal within the jet-set lifestyle of the 1960s. It opens with a heavily distorted spoken sample from Tex Watson about killing everyone who was not beautiful, and its repeating drum beat is played on floor toms.
Floria Sigismondi directed the video at the then-abandoned Gooderham and Worts distillery in Toronto. Manson appeared on stilts in prosthetic makeup, and the clip was nominated for two 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. The single reached number 26 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart and number 18 in the UK. A remix by J. G. Thirlwell was the opening theme of WWF Raw is War for a few weeks in March 1997.
The Beautiful People runs at 144 BPM, the tempo of dubstep and trap counted in half time, and hardstyle. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.67 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 417 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.