Ok here it goes.
GAOTG was an anti-concept album.
After doing ACSS, MA, and especially Holywood - I feel like he got tired of the fact that people expected him to "say something". This is something that goes on until this day. Every new album after Holywood, the press, the fans, everyone clamors to hear what he's going to say about the current state of the world and politics. And, I suppose he's in-part, to blame. He knows people expects it, he knows people expects "shock" too, and he just does a lot of stuff to bait people by their expectations (See the Trump be-heading video) or he makes songs like Jesus CrI$I$.
Jesus CrI$I$, I really feel is sort of in the vein or spirit of GAOTG, in that it's a bit sarcastic, bratty, and flippant - it's like .. you want shock? Here's a meaningless song of strung together words and terms of religion, violence, drugs, that in the end.. is meaningless. There's no narrative, there's no point. It's going, is this what you want? Here, have at it.
Holywood was the most thematically over-complicated album he ever did, crowning a trilogy of concept albums. Holywood was Manson trying to best his 'master' (Trent Reznor), it was him trying to prove that he can do overcomplicated albums too, without him. It was a soundtrack to a book that was never published.
The book was his response to being blamed for Columbine. And the story is deeply entrenched in a parallel universe where the occult's alternative versions of history make up that universe's past. There's a lot of "gotchas" in Holywood, for example - the song length of "president dead" is the same length (to the second) of Zapruder's film that captured the JFK assassination.
I feel after the tryptych, after being blamed for Columbine and responding to it, after a decade of people expecting him to be increasingly political since that's what he had done... he was just exhausted.
And wanted to re-assert himself as an artist. He wanted to make something that.. in a way said nothing.
So he put out a "pop" album - that pulled from a lot of odd artistic movements. For instance, the "dada" movement that tried to get in touch with pure human subconsciousness. You see this in songs like Para-noir, where John 5 has a guitar solo. The solo was recorded in one take - he was blindfolded and handed an out-of-tune guitar for the solo. Or songs like Vodevil, that has meaningless phonetic poetry in the middle of all the lyrics. Phonetic poetry was a staple of dada, often having no vowels and no actual words in it.
He pulled a lot of elements - either in video, the fashions and artwork he did with Gottfried Helnwein, that emphasized ..either style over substance, or style AS substance. There were reference of vaudeville, early pre-code films, the burlesque movement, the art culture of pre-WWII Weimer Berlin which was incredibly obscene.
He touched on the fact that during times of political upheaval - that pure entertainment could be uplifting. That escapism has a purpose - not just an entertainment purpose but an artistic one. He, at the time, compared Marlene Dietrich's films (a German actress that migrated to the US during WWII) to, in part, what he was trying to accomplish with his album - which came out during the Iraq War. There's tons of allusions to silent/pre-code/golden-age hollywood throughout, the "we have faces" line is a definite reference to a quote straight out of Sunset Boulevard (70s noir film about the silent film era)
I mean .. in my words, it's like what a Seinfeld episode would be if it were a Marilyn Manson song or album. It takes all the immediate and obvious things that people associate with the brand of marilyn manson - loud, gothy, rock music, over the top vids and stage shows and fashion, songs that make references to drugs, violence, fame, and sex..and using that as the fashion to wrap up this purposeful, empty, meaningless album. It's a piece of escapism that's a rebellion against all he'd ever done at that point and all that was expected of him.
Like with Holywood, but moreso, - I think his reach is much much farther than his grasp. He's biting off too many ideas at once and it's not strung together is a really cohesive way - but given the attitude of the album I think cohesively tying together all these thoughts and influences doesn't really matter as much as it does in something like Holywood.
The album, IMHO, was a huge reset button for his career - for better or worse.
He's never made a political album since. Every album since this one, has been personal (more or less). And I think that was the point of it. He wanted an album that could be a turning point for him. To get out of one of the many corners he had painted himself into.
I think it's every bit of a concept album as holywood is, it's just..rebelling against the very idea of a concept in the process.