"WOW" is the ninth track from Marilyn Manson's 2009 release The High End of Low. Its title was revealed on April 7, 2009, in a blog which described both itself and another song from the album, "Arma-goddamn-motherfuckin-geddon".
Music details
A blog by Metal Hammer describes "WOW" as "a grinding, NIN-tinged sex anthem. Genuinely filthy and intensely sexy, The Wow sees Manson riding a dirty Twiggy Ramirez bassline in an almost spoken-word style. Quirky keyboards interject all the way through the track while sexual female groans swarm behind the crunching industrial backing track. The Wow doesn't have anything in the way of memorable hooks but it is the sort of track that would sound amazing in a goth stripclub...if one existed." Reviewing for Thrash Hits, Hugh Platt stated that "for every killer track there's one like 'WOW', a gutful of sickly electro honky-tonk with Manson at his lyrically most self-absorbed." John Robb of The Quietusdeems that the song "is very Iggy Pop|Iggy ; Iggy when he swerved and went industrial on The Idiot." In an interview with BBC Radio's 6 Music, Manson acknowledged this influence, and also explained the song has literary references to the 1868Fyodor Dostoevsky novel The Idiot.
Music video
On May 11, 2010 a music video for "WOW" was released to Manson's MySpaceaccount. It was directed by Marilyn Manson and consists of nothing more than a two-second clip being looped for about six minutes. The clip shows Evan Rachel Wood, in make-up reminiscent of the Black Dahlia, playing with the strap of her dress. According to the video's description it was filmed in 2008, about a year before the album's release, and was a "torture production technique used to write the song with the boys." Presumably this means the video existed before the song itself. Oddly the video continues for over a minute longer than the song.
The hollow whistling noiseat the beginning of the song is thought to be Manson "snorting something — whatever it might have been" as a percussive instrument. The substance was presumably, cocaine.
