Upon its release, the album met with mixed to negative reviews from music critics.
AllMusic gave it a mixed review and said: "Where the full-length debut showed sparks of character and invention beneath industrial metal sludge,
Smells Like Children is a smartly crafted horror show, filled with vulgarity, ugliness, goth freaks, and sideshow scares. Manson wisely chose to heighten his cartoonish personality with the EP. Most of the record is devoted to spoken words and samples, all designed to push the outrage buttons of middle America. Musically, it may not amount to much—it's goth-metal-industrial, as good as the '
Dope Hat,' '
Lunchbox,' and 'Cake and Sodomy' trilogy that distinguished the debut—but as a sonic sculpture, as an ''objet d'art'', it's effective and wickedly fascinating. It's exactly what
Brian Warner needed to do to establish Marilyn Manson as America's bogeyman for the late '90s." In his review for
The Village Voice, music critic
Robert Christgau defined
Smells Like Children as an "Unmitigated consumer fraud—a mess of instrumentals, covers, and remixes designed to exploit its well-publicized tour,
genderfuck cover art, titillating titles, and
parental warning label. The lyrics to 'Shitty Chicken Gang Bang' are nonexistent, those to 'Everlasting Cocksucker' incomprehensible. Only 'Fuck Frankie,' a spoken-word number in which a female feigning
sexual ecstasy reveals that it isn't 'Fool Frankie' or 'Fire Frankie' or 'Fast Frankie' or for that matter 'Fist Frankie,' delivers what it promises. It's easily the best thing on the record."
Exclaim! Liisa Ladouceur ranked
Smells Like Children fourth on her list of the essential Marilyn Manson albums. Ladouceur wrote that "[this] collection...was poorly received on release but proves a much more interesting document of the [band's] early years than 1994's debut album,
Portrait of an American Family."
Controversy On May 30, 1996, the co-directors of the
conservative advocacy group Empower America (now known as
FreedomWorks),
Republican Secretary of Education William Bennett and
Democrat Senator Joseph Lieberman, organized a
bipartisan press conference, along with
Secretary of Pennsylvania State C. Delores Tucker, wherein they admonished the
record industry for selling "prepackaged, shrink-wrapped nihilism." Bennett claimed that "nothing less is at stake than civilization" against lyrics which Lieberman decried, "celebrate some of the most antisocial and immoral behaviors imaginable." Tucker concurred noting that, "these companies have the blood of children on their hands ... We protect owls. We protect whales. We must protect children." The moral crusaders largely targeted
rap music and five
music conglomerates:
Time Warner,
Bertelsmann Music Group,
PolyGram,
Thorn EMI, and
Sony Music—leaving out
MCA (which had recently acquired
Interscope at the time)—an absence MTV noted as "strange", leading them to postulate "that perhaps Tucker or Bennett own some stock in the company". Nevertheless, the group did not forget to bring up Marilyn Manson and
Smells Like Children. Empower America also took the opportunity to announce, at the press conference, they were launching a $25,000 radio ad campaign to collect petitions from listeners who want the record companies to "stop spreading this vicious, vulgar music." ==Track listing==