What word comes to your mind when you hear the name “Marilyn Manson”? Do you think to yourself “classy”? Or perhaps you think “relevant”? Congratulations, one person. The rest of us think he’s pretty sad and douchetastic. So, Marilyn has confirmed that he has been temporarily felled by a case of the swine flu. Epic. But Marilyn can’t just say “Swine flu, chicken broth, blah, blah”. He has to make a “joke” about “pig f-cking” and ex-girlfriends. Because you can’t spell “classy” without A-S-S.

Marilyn Manson’s voracious appetite for the high life may not yet have caught up with him, but he has been felled by a potentially deadly virus. Yes, the self-styled “God of F-ck” has gone down with a bout of swine flu, temporarily putting his career as an aging goth-rocker on hold.

“So I have officially been diagnosed, by a real doctor, with THE SWINE FLU,” he said.

“I know everyone will suggest that f-cking a pig is how this disease was obtained. However, the doctor said, my past choices in women have in no way contributed to me acquiring this mysterious sickness. Unfortunately, I am going to survive.”

Manson’s career has reached such a low point that he was churning out songs that had lapsed painfully into self-parody (I’m looking at you, “Pretty as a Swastika”). And his fans weren’t enamored, with this year’s The High End of Low hitting an all-time sales slump for Manson, and his interviews around the record sinking into desperate cliché.

[From Prefix Magazine]

Back in June, Marilyn did an interview with Spin in which he described a piece of art he made with condoms, and described how he hadn’t used them in a while: “I had two condoms — alien things to me, I haven’t seen them in 25 years — and I threw them on the mirror, and they stuck, and they formed this piece of modern art.” This was the same interview where Marilyn described how he felt about ex-girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood: “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer.” So, I guess we can assume that Marilyn’s swine flu joke was about Evan (just a guess). Although, without condoms for 25 years, I can only guess that he has probably distributed more than his fair share of viruses, diseases, and goth crabs.