More Garbage
Hey y’all, it’s been a moment. My summer—and spring, really—was strange and busy, full of unique stresses and unique joys, both of which threw me off of my typical routines. Which can be fun sometimes, but we could all use a little grounding.
Among the joys: returning to Chicago for the first time since moving away in October 2016, returning to Pitchfork Fest for the first time since that summer, returning to the company of two very dear friends Rachelle and I hadn’t seen in ages and whose kindness and love and connection was not dimmed by time. It’s always a little anxiety-inducing to meet up with people with whom you were once close but have fallen out of touch. We saw one another in Long Beach on a rainy morning this February and it felt as though the years collapsed without obliterating all that had happened within them. We are, all four of us, very different people than who we were in 2016, and yet whatever flame we’d all gathered around together has not gone out or even dimmed, we just hadn’t had occasion to approach its warmth.
In some ways, the week we spent in Chicago, and particularly the times we spent with our friends, felt like a kind of dream. We crammed into the photo booth at Rainbo on the night I DJed there with Jeremy Larson and Jacob Daneman, and now every morning while I wait for the coffee to brew, I look at the photo we took as if i’m looking at a relic. It feels miraculous to me that, even in the midst of incredible stress and confusion, in the middle of what’s been a very challenging year, we could be given a gift like this.
While we were in Chicago, Jeremy asked me to write a Sunday Review of Garbage’s 1998 album Version 2.0. That went up yesterday. I’m very pleased with how it turned out.
A few years ago, I hit upon the idea that music criticism is a form of memoir. This is one of those things that sounds true when you first write it out and then have to puzzle through what it means after you’ve already shared it. I think what I mean when I say this is that, over time, a writer’s criticism reveals the evolution of their values, both artistic and personal, if the work is done well, in addition to it tracking the evolution of taste.
What I mean is that I couldn’t have written this review in, e.g., 2020. As I’ve spent the last 18 months transitioning, both my taste and my critical values have evolved rapidly. For most of my life, I didn’t have any strong feeling about Garbage one way or the other. I saw them at Voodoo Fest in 2002, the fall of my senior year of high school, and remember it mostly because it began raining in the middle of "I'm Only Happy When It Rains," to the delight of Shirley Manson, and that the guys at my high school who were in a pop-punk band made fun of Steve Marker and Duke Erikson for playing keyboards while still strapped into their guitars.
Now, though, Garbage seems to me to be an incredibly important band for a couple of reasons. They upended the version of “authenticity” that was articulated by bands in the early 90s who had come up through indie rock into the mainstream, replacing it with a kind of open-minded wonder at the possibilities of sound without wandering into naïveté. This came through in the music itself, which was proudly artificial and obviously put together in a computer, even when it kinda sounded like the work of a normal band, and it came through in the ways Manson positioned herself as a woman, both in her songwriting and in her presentation. It’s very clear from the first notes of “Supervixen,” the first song on their debut album, that Garbage is operating by different principles from the other bands on alt-rock radio, including the other woman-fronted bands. They just about fit in, but something about them felt strange, off, different, like they were treating alt-rock as burlesque when everyone else treated it as a lifeline. You can imagine Scott Weiland singing “Doll Parts,” but you can’t imagine him doing “I Think I’m Paranoid.”
I wrote about all of that in the review, though. What I didn’t get to, because I’d already filed 3500 words, was that I’m still struck by how queer Garbage feels. Part of this feeling is based on messaging. I didn't understand myself as queer in 1995 but I imagine that hearing Shirley Manson sing the word in a non-derogatory way in the song "Queer" had to have been thrilling for alternative-minded suburban kids who didn't have access to super-gay bands like Pansy Division or Tribe8. A few years later, she'd write the song "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)," essentially cheerleading trans people all the way back in 2001.
There are plenty of artists who present themselves as good-faith allies without feeling queer themselves. God bless Macklemore, but I can't imagine feeling like I see myself in his music, you know? But back in April, when I randomly pulled up the “Push It” video after watching Herbie Hancock’s similarly surrealist “Rockit” video, I felt a strange, immediate, unquestionable conviction that this music was queer as fuck. “Do you know the band Garbage?” I texted a trans friend, who didn’t. “I never use this phrase, but this video is For The Dolls.”
That’s still the only time I’ve used that phrase in earnest. I’m ambivalent about most of popular trans culture, which is probably partly owing to my living as a cis man for so long and partly because, look, I’m just not that kind of girl. I’m wary of group identification and resistant to cultural pressure to like things just because a lot of people who are like me take pleasure in them (or feel like they should). I love, sincerely love, my friends who find a lot of joy and meaning in being part of the culture, but it’s not how I understand myself. I've spent so much time shaping myself along the contours of other people's interests.
The "Push It" video works because it gleefully, almost hysterically, pulls things out of context and reassembles them with great care. There’s a haunted suburban grocery store, dudes with lightbulbs for heads, a sub-plot that I think involves Manson being married to one of the lightbulbs, another subplot that I think involves her being a spy. A woman who looks a bit like Manson but isn’t climbs out of a bathtub and wanders around in a daze. There are little kids menacingly riding their parents like bucking broncos. At one point, Manson is in a graveyard, and the camera does a proto-Matrix 360º spin around her as she lifts her leg. At another, she’s doing chair yoga while dressed as a naval officer. The video’s construction is so meticulous, it implies a kind of logic; even if we don’t understand what we’re seeing (I certainly don’t), it’s incredibly convincing as a single, unified piece. I believe that it is, whatever it is.
This is what it feels like to reassemble yourself from the ground up. I sometimes feel like I've consciously pulled together bits and pieces of everything I've ever found interesting—90s alt-girl style, horror movies, black metal, the Premier League, books where not much happens, clove cigarettes, college football, music criticism, the word "cunt"—to see if I could fashion something coherent out of it. If not coherent, believable. “To be trans is to desire a process of internal ‘creolization’: to accept that one can only arrive at oneself thanks to change, to mutation, to hybridization,” Paul B. Preciado writes. What I need isn't just what I find inside of myself. I'm becoming real by posing.
Taking the risk of piecing yourself together from what feels like someone else's parts can be very challenging if you've always understood personal integrity to be tied to a sense of certainty about who you are, even on a superficial level. Maybe it's an over-identification with aesthetics and signifiers, but when you've been asking yourself Am I the kind of person who likes tank tops? your whole life, simply putting one on to see how it feels is a major move.
I think this is what drew me in with Garbage, a band I thought I completely understood as Not For Me before I was old enough to drive. They are obviously so delighted by the process of chasing down everything that seemed interesting to them, regardless of how it might change the way they were perceived, regardless of the fact that it made them something much closer to pop stars than underground heroes. In the notes I kept while working on my Version 2.0 review, I returned over and over to a sentiment that defines the record and so much more: The faker it seems, the realer it becomes.
“[My wig] became my permanent hair,” Lucy Sante writes in I Heard Her Call My Name, her beautiful transition memoir. “It is in fact so central an aspect of me that now and then I lapse into brooding about authenticity. How can I be defined by something I didn’t grow or make?” Forty pages later, she comes to a kind of answer. “I’m not really very concerned with what you might call authenticity, at least these days. I’m more preoccupied with taste, because taste has always been the way I demonstrate that I’m as valid as anyone else.”