LOS ANGELES — Anyone drawing parallels between the new Marilyn Manson video for "The Fight Song" and the Columbine High School shootings is simply trying to create scandal, the oft-targeted rocker says.

"People will put into it what they want if it helps them sell newspapers or helps them write a headline," Manson told MTV News while attending the American Music Awards on Monday. "They're gonna want to turn it into something it isn't. Flak is my job."

The nearly completed video depicts jocks battling goth-rockers. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the outcast Columbine students who killed a dozen classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves, were tagged as members of the school's goth community and were said to hate jocks, targeting them among their victims.

Further fueling speculation over the new video is the widespread misconception that Klebold and Harris were Manson fans. Early press reports on the 1999 Littleton, Colorado, tragedy quoted other students as saying they were, but it later turned out that neither was a Manson fan.

"[In the video,] I'm trying to show that sports as well as music can be seen as violent," he said. "So I chose sort of a black-and-white [theme] — not as far as racial lines — but just the traditional black vs. white, good vs. evil theme for the video."

Clad in a black corset and tights, the singer and his namesake band performed "Disposable Teens," the first single off November's Holy Wood, at the American Music Awards.

"I'm not even sure why we're here — I think it was an accident," he said. "We want to represent peace because we feel that if you give the world peace they want war. So we feel that by representing peace we're furthering the destruction of mankind with our music."