Garbage was fake. In the mid-1990s, when a rock band was meant to wear Chuck Taylors and ripped jeans, publicly fret over the power gap between itself and the audience, and above all insist that the best thing art could do was remind everyone of the worst things about being alive—when all of this was called authenticity, and its performance was prized more than the performance of a monster riff—they were flagrantly inauthentic. They wrote big, garish alt-rock songs with choruses that mocked what they saw as alt-rock’s garishly romanticized depression. Their albums sounded like they cost a million dollars to make; their videos did cost a million dollars to make. Where other artists confessed or pleaded, Garbage teased, wrapping the radio up in a pink feather boa and blowing their listeners a kiss. And somehow, strangely, they were old, at least in pop-music terms: Singer Shirley Manson, the youngest, the one whose stage manner would soon have male rock critics bug-eyed and howling awooga, was nearly 30 when the band released their first album in 1995.
Age was Garbage’s greatest asset, and it was the secret to their artistic success. It freed them from the pressures of having to play the tedious cred games that had been embroiling alt-rock since the first jock caught a whiff of Teen Spirit. Manson was already a 10-year veteran of the Scottish indie rock scene, and had been spotted by the rest of Garbage—first guitarist Steve Marker, who then told drummer Butch Vig, and guitarist Duke Erikson—when MTV played her band Angelfish’s video for the first and only time. Vig, on the cusp of 40 himself, was arguably the most important music producer in the world, fresh off a run of records so epochal their titles can still be recognized without reference to the artists who made them: Gish, Nevermind, Bricks Are Heavy, Dirty, Siamese Dream. Having arguably done more than anyone else to bring the DIY ethics of the early ’90s indie scene to people around the world, he washed his hands of the entire thing and set about the business of manufacturing music of his own.
With Erikson and Marker, the latter his partner at Madison, Wisconsin’s Smart Studios, Vig was being commissioned for remixes by bands like Nine Inch Nails and U2. They would strip things down all the way to the vocals and re-fill the blank space with newly recorded guitar, moans of feedback, found-sound samples, processed keyboards, digital litter, and whatever else they could think of. Vig already knew plenty about the trickery that went into making a band sound alive and overwhelmingly present on a record. On Nevermind, he’d used what Krist Novoselic called “electronic sleight of hand” to punch up Kurt Cobain’s performances, patching together vocals to give the impression of a single coherent take. If you could do it with a song, why not construct a band the same way—not by woodshedding demos or jamming with your buds in the garage, but by playing on the computer?
By the time Garbage released their second album, Version 2.0, in 1998, they had gone from studio-tinkerer experiment to international pop phenomenon with a Bond theme on the horizon. Despite Vig’s pedigree and the provocative nature of the music itself, they were primarily understood through the lens of image: They were shallow, a studio band fronted by a woman an NME critic called “Skeletor on stilts” who was “$10 billion’s worth of sex on steroids” and was, as one Rolling Stone writer reported once he rolled his tongue back into his mouth, rumored to play shows without wearing underwear. They were “Disco Techs and the Sex-O-Lette,” a good-natured Spin profile jokingly labeled them. The general idea, Manson said, was that she was “the face of the clock and the boys are working the gears.”
Manson knew how she would be seen—both physically and as a symbol, a Scottish woman nobody had ever heard of standing in front of Butch Vig’s band, not even playing the guitar—and she knew how that would make people react. She constructed Garbage’s look with great intention, hiring fashion photographers to shoot promo photos and convincing the men to ditch their flannel for tailored suits. If her work as an artist was going to be seen through the lens of her gender, she figured, she may as well play with it and become a virtuoso.
“A lot of women still feel like they can’t play up their feminine side and be taken seriously as an artist, but I still see that as suffering at the hands of a male-dominated industry. I love to wear beautiful clothes and I love wearing make-up and I love for people to make me look as good as I possibly can,” she told style mag The Face in 1996. “Being a woman is to be enjoyed just the same as being a man is to be enjoyed.” Manson understood herself as a beneficiary of the work bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile had done earlier in the decade, paving the way for women in music to embrace their sexuality without feeling like they had to sacrifice their intelligence.
But that didn’t mean she wanted to look like a riot grrrl. “I was aware that alt-girls were dressing sort of tough,” she said years later. “They were all in plaid shirts, jeans, and combat boots. I didn’t want to be like that—not because I didn’t think it was a cool look, but I just wanted to have my own identity and stick out from the crowd.” At a time when people were still calling Courtney Love’s Peter Pan dresses “kinderwhore” in earnest and woman bands like L7 were making a point of looking as ugly as guy bands like TAD, Manson chose glamor: oversized cheetah coats, wraparound shades, electric blue shift dresses, knee-high leather boots. And more than anything: eyeliner. Loads of it. Always carefully applied, always conspicuous in its presence.
Every other band on MTV—male or female—seemed to be righteously preserving the dignity of women by subverting rock’s traditional gender roles. Manson was doing the same thing by opposite means, dolling herself to show that even traditional femininity was something you had to work very hard at and that it therefore wasn’t something that came naturally to all women. It was an approach that was ripe for misinterpretation and abuse; an A&R guy told her he “wanked to pictures of me,” she once said. It was risky to gender-bend backwards.
Manson’s approach to how she looked was a cosmetic manifestation of the clatter and slick of Garbage’s impeccably arranged electro-grunge, another way of pursuing authenticity by rejecting the aesthetics of authenticity. The faker it all appeared, the realer it all became. The music on their quadruple-platinum 1995 self-titled debut sounded decadently synthetic but still clearly the work of a rock band. You could listen to “Stupid Girl” or “I’m Only Happy When It Rains” and imagine the people playing it. On Version 2.0, Garbage still mostly sounds like a rock band, but it’s nearly impossible to picture the four of them sweating these songs out together on individual instruments; at times it’s hard to believe that the instruments themselves were ever played by a human being.
Vig’s signature production on those foaming guitars fills the album, but for the most part they don’t seem to be strummed or picked so much as applied to the walls with a paint roller. He hammers out short, tense phrases, approaching live drums like he’s programming a drum machine. Layers of live and sampled playing pile up in huge stacks, replacing feel or swing with more loops triggered just off the beat. In the album’s most vulnerable song, “Medication,” Manson’s delicate contemplation is swamped by a wall of Loveless noise that’s riddled with crunched-out Antichrist Superstar percussion. Even when Version 2.0 appears to be straightforward—as it does on the unstoppably melodic single “When I Grow Up,” an electro power-pop song that would’ve also been a hit in 1988 or 2008—it sounds as sleek, supersonic, and expensive as the Concorde.
Throughout, Manson is in control. Most of the time, she’s calm. Calm in the way that someone who has been hurt and is patiently waiting for the right moment to retaliate is calm. It’s implied that anger is pacing behind the walls of her singing. She dismantles her subjects’ self-images with a single touch. “You still don’t know what you think of me,” she taunts in “Dumb.” In “Special,” she tells a former lover that she’s “spread disease about you over town,” a line made all the nastier by the obvious delight she gets in singing it. Her most brilliant move, just as “Push It”’s chorus is shredded into modem noise and guitar shrapnel, is a stage-whispered command: “Make the beats go harder.” She is perhaps the only ’90s alt-rock icon to have made it through the decade without screaming on a record.
That “Push It” line, both the command of the words and the lusty pleasure Manson takes in singing them, may as well be the album’s mission statement. Version 2.0 is dense in detail the way a body is dense in cells: The amount of activity is overwhelming and impossible to take in all at once, so you see it as a unified whole. You have to zoom in to see what feels like millions of tiny parts working together. This is by design. Version 2.0 was one of the first major albums to be recorded entirely with ProTools. Garbage stuffed so many tracks into the interface that they’d crash the program every few days, then ask the ProTools programmers to rewrite the code and update their copy. At one point, the band discovered that the highest number of crossfades the program could support in a song was 65,536.
Despite that sense of scale, and a level of studio ambition that rivals Brian Wilson’s circa Smile, Version 2.0 never quite forgets its imperatives as a pop record. It often gets there by reminding people of records they’ve already fallen in love with. There are countless references to other bands, whether direct or otherwise. “Special” nicks its coda from the Pretenders’ “Talk of the Town,” but the bright fingerpicking that rings the song open and the thumping beat that propels it makes it feel like R.E.M. playing every floor of Danceteria; it sounds more like Big Star than the cover of “Thirteen” they’d record for the b-side of the “Push It” single. “I tried, and I tried, and I tried,” Manson sings over a campy cowboy riff in “Wicked Ways,” flipping Mick Jagger’s brag about his unmet libido into her narrator’s frustration at her inability to control her sexual impulses. The multi-layered chorus of opener “Temptation Waits” manages to channel a dozen or so of the most polished singles of the previous decades: “Heart of Glass,” “Into the Groove,” “Sharp-Dressed Man,” a handful of Kylie Minogue songs, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”
The sound that gushes from Version 2.0 isn’t just about flooding the audience with pure pop pleasure, it’s also about what it feels like to live your life swimming through the outpouring of someone else’s heart. Over and over, the album recreates the sensation of being overwhelmed by a great melody, and how a perfect song can inadvertently convince you that a singer’s feelings are yours, too. Something as simple as a good tune can penetrate very deeply into your being and change everything it touches on the way down.
Garbage’s self-aware take on being a music fan is also an advantage of age: Once you’ve experienced the complexities of love in the real world, you begin to understand how the three-minute pop song has warped your expectations. Stare into Version 2.0’s oversaturated technicolor for long enough and the acidic, biting pop songs start to sound like comments on decades’ worth of sugary, naive pop songs. When Manson sings about being called codependent in “Medication,” she seems to be singing about a romantic partner; she may as well be singing about music itself.
This velvet tension is easiest to feel in the way Manson interpolates the American Breed’s 1967 bubblegum hit “Bend Me, Shape Me” in “I Think I’m Paranoid.” The original is meant to be a cheeky wink at all the things boys will put up with in the name of puppy love. When they sing “Bend me, shape me, any way you want me,” they’re moony-eyed at the idea of where they might be able to fit once they flex a little bit. Manson’s tone seems to be identical—you can imagine her singing into a hairbrush—but she makes two small edits to the lyric, turning it into “Bend me, break me, any way you need me.” The message is clear: A man will go ga-ga for a woman because he knows he can bend himself back at any time; the moment a woman sells herself out to the will of a man, she’s already broken.
Manson’s changes spoil the cheery purity of her delivery. It’s plastic, and she wants you to know it: “Prop me up with another pill,” she deadpans in the verses, ”I think I’m paranoid/Manipulated.” By the end of the song, she’s twirling the chorus around her finger, relishing the feeling of having gained the upper hand by exposing how the whole thing works. Later, she coos a bit of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” in “Push It” just before the music behind her is thrown into a vortex. The sound Vig likened to “a dump truck in a tornado” is the demolition of mid-century pop’s sweet assurances.
In their place, Garbage heaps pleasure—the kind of autonomous, self-satisfied pleasure that comes from knowing your own desires. Listen to the way the “Push It” bassline gulps along with a slight reggae tilt, like it’s winding its way through a hail of locusts. Feel Manson’s breath on your ear when she spins into a frenzy of whispers in “Hammering in My Head” and fantasizes about taking a bullet train across the Pacific. Run your hands over the polished speedway chrome of “Special,” with its gleaming harmonies. Surf the gaps in the strobed-out guitars that light up the album, the blank spaces in their rapid firing mimicking the terminator distortion of Public Enemy producers The Bomb Squad. Feel the transgressive prickle as a slither of synth in “Sleep Together” snips the boundary of taste separating Björk and the nü-wave of Orgy. Even the puffed nubs on the album cover are begging to be touched.
For years, alt-rock insisted that real music was made by human beings playing physical instruments in the same room. “All sounds made by guitar, bass, drums, and vocals,” went the caps-lock disclaimer in the booklet for all four Rage Against the Machine albums, as if the presence of a sampler or drum machine would invalidate the purity of their message. There were many ways that music could convince you not to love what you wanted to love in the way you wanted to love it; there still are. If the songwriting on Version 2.0 is a rejection of pop music’s content, the album’s essential impossibility—the way it revels in its own artificiality—is a rejection of alt-rock’s forms.
Of course, Garbage wasn’t the only band trying to redirect alternative music as it approached the new millennium. Curve had already bridged the worlds of shoegaze and UK club music. Smashing Pumpkins put out the electro-goth Adore the same year, the Prodigy’s fire had already been started, the Spawn soundtrack had become more popular than the film itself, and White Zombie was shuffling techno beats, porno samples, and heavy guitars in a way that suggested a haunted version of America Online. God Lives Underwater, Poe, and the Sneaker Pimps all attempted to siphon some of Massive Attack’s chiaroscuro sexiness to varying success.
