How Shirley Manson of Garbage Changed What a Rock Frontwoman Could Be
When the U.K./Wisconsin quartet Garbage released its self-titled debut album 20 years ago, they were known as the band formed by Nevermind producer Butch Vig. But with time, they became better known for something else: its lead singer, Shirley Manson. A rare breed for the time, she combined sexuality, dominance, and accessibility into a perfect rock storm. On one hand, her hybrid aesthetic of trip hop, alternative, and pop made her more mainstream than riot grrrl bands Bikini Kill and L7. On the other, her outspokenness and frankness about the inclusion of women in the male-dominated music industry was every bit as groundbreaking as riot grrrl, just on a larger platform.
Garbage’s record came out just as Britpop was peaking across the pond. Britpop was all the rage in the UK and it managed to trickle to the States, with frontwomen Justine Frischmann of Elastica, Louise Wener of Sleeper, and Meriel Barham of Lush crossing over to MTV’s Buzz Bin brand, but Garbage wasn’t Britpop, even though Manson hailed from Scotland. To put things in perspective, how many people are able to name the lead singer of Elastica versus the lead singer of Garbage? Elastica had a couple of hits and a gold-selling debut album, but faded away; Garbage and Manson are still relatively current in people’s minds. The difference is Elastica and other UK bands at the time made a blip for a spell but didn’t have the mainstream appeal and the longevity of Garbage. Those aforementioned frontwomen seemed to subscribe to the same tomboy-ish angular haircuts and dark, grungy clothes whereas Manson broke out of that mold in being sleeker, both in fashion and her full-on rock sound.
In the wake of her popularity, a strata of female musicians have embodied Shirley’s postmodern, empowered, post-riot grrrl ethos. Before Manson arrived on the scene, women in rock — especially female-fronted rock bands — tended to belong to a narrow category. “The mid- to late-’90s brought the burst of new archetypes of women in music,” said Jessica Hopper, a senior editor at Pitchfork and author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. Before that, she said, women in rock had two models for themselves: either Joan Jett or Joni Mitchell, the tough girl or the confessional singer-songwriter type. But Manson represented something that fell in between. Manson’s personal songwriting embraced the Mitchell sector, but Manson wasn’t standing alone in front of a crowd of people strumming an acoustic guitar. She also wasn’t as in-your-face as Jett, so Manson fused the best of those worlds together into a congenial frontwoman. With Manson, it was like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the color scheme goes from black-and-white to a Technicolor dreamscape. Manson’s mesmeric arrival on the music scene was basically Dorothy leaving hum-drum Kansas and landing in Oz.
“Now we have a lot more space for women to be different personas and to self-create,” Hopper said. “Shirley was very instrumental in that way” — introducing a different, nuanced persona for women to inhabit. Women were able to explore those spaces instead of being pigeonholed into one camp or another. They were able to curate their personalities (see: Lady Gaga) and represent less of a concrete persona — what you see is what you get — but manifest more abstract creations involving context and depth.
In 1995, Manson wore shift dresses that rose above the knee, paired with combat boots, raccoon-eyeliner eyes, and vermillion hair. She was edgy but approachable, unlike her contemporary Courtney Love, whose screaming and shocking behavior were sometimes deemed too intense for some people. “Garbage’s music was sexy at a time when that was essentially verboten in a lot of the women who were playing with ideas of gender and sexuality,” Hopper says. “How Shirley was engaging with gender and womanhood was different than how anybody else was doing it.” Manson avoided playing with archetypes of girlishness, but she also didn’t try to project an image of masculinity — she seemed comfortable just being a woman. Manson’s adult demeanor challenged the likes of just-one-of-the-guys Gwen Stefani, who with her group No Doubt, had a hit song in the fall of 1995 called “Just a Girl.” (Note how the song was not called “Just a Woman.”) Instead of wearing dresses, Stefani chose to wear crop tops paired with track pants and appeared more masculine than feminine. Each of them did open up pathways for women (Stefani reinvented the traditionally male-dominated ska music), yet Stefani’s peppy SoCal girl made her seem more tangible than Manson’s arsenal of aloofness, subversiveness, cheekiness, and bluntness, which she especially used to her advantage in being unapologetic and honest in interviews.
Perhaps the clearest forerunner of Manson is one of her idols, Siouxsie Sioux, the queen of goth. In an interview for The Skinny, Manson explains what attracted her to Siouxsie: “I loved everything about the fact that she was in a band, she was a writer, that she sang completely differently from everybody else, that she was rebellious and intelligent and incredibly articulate.” Manson, in fact, exhibited all of those qualities and proved she could concurrently be a little unhinged and smart, all the while jettisoning Siouxsie’s achromatic punk for a multicolored palate. Another notable antecedent for Manson is perhaps Grace Jones, the Jamaican singer who more explicitly challenged gender norms with her fashion and experimented with genres ranging from new wave to post-punk to reggae.
In a 1997 Spin cover story about Manson, Charles Aaron wrote:
“Before, Nirvana-derived alternative rock had been all about a rush of boyish heat (which Courtney Love then gleefully doused with period blood): afterwards, alternative pop has become a reflection of Manson’s cagey, adult, female cool. Over music that was all spooky, shiny shadings — echoes of Chet Baker, Leonard Cohen, Joy Division, the Jesus and Mary Chain — her ambiguous vocals and lyrics (yes, she wrote them!) brimmed with a moody wit that suggested all sorts of scenarios. As with the best pure pop, you could project yourselves into the songs, and fantasize.”
For the band’s music videos, viewers became fantasists while they locked into Manson’s hard gaze, and her “you can look, but you can’t touch” attitude. Garbage’s hit songs — “Queer”, “Stupid Girl”, “Special”, “Only Happy When It Rains” — were emotive pop songs couched as psychological ruminations on life, love, and the interplay between angels and demons. Manson’s breathy, sensual vocals dripped with subtext, such as on the album’s opener, “Supervixen”: “Stick a stone in your mouth / You can always pull out if you like it too much / Bow down to me.” Her coy lyrics suggested something sexual yet they were self-aware. Songs like “Only Happens When It Rains” — “I feel good when things are going wrong” — bubbled with angst but weren’t as earnest and self-serious as grunge. In fact, they were satirizing grunge.
“It’s really just us poking fun at ourselves,” Steve Marker, the band’s guitarist, once said about “Rains”. “We’re poking fun at the alterna-rock angst, wearing your heart on your sleeve thing and at ourselves for writing such dark songs.”
The band also offered a more accessible version of what popular alternative rock was serving up at the time. Garbage’s songs still had an aggressive edge but they could appeal to those turned off by the pure anger in Nirvana’s music, Hopper said. In 1994, Marker was watching MTV 120 Minutes when he saw a video for a Scottish band called Angelfish, and Manson just happened to be the lead singer. The guys knew they wanted a female singer, so they had her come to Madison, Wis., to audition, and she joined the group. “Shirley had a darkness and a depth to her that you just don’t get out of many bands that are around right now,” Marker said, and they liked the idea of noisy and “trashy rhythms” coming from a woman’s perspective. Butch was tired of producing grunge records and wanted to form a band with an eclectic pop sound in which an array of genres got thrown into the kitchen sink. Since 1995, Garbage has released four more albums, including 2012’s Not Your Kind of People, which came after their 2005 hiatus. On October 6 they’ll kick off a 20th anniversary world tour, in San Diego, revisiting what they started so long ago.
But in 2015 we’re living in a world that’s filled with many women influenced — consciously or otherwise — by Manson, even if no one quite fits the label of her “successor.” Manson introduced the dichotomies of concurrently being mainstream and underground, vulnerable and alpha-female, and also someone who was forward-thinking, deeply thoughtful, and in control of her self-made image. Lana Del Rey, Karen O, Manson collaborator Brody Dalle, Florence Welch, Janelle Monáe, Peaches, Lady Gaga, Grimes, and the David Bowie-esque St. Vincent, all lend themselves to Manson’s sphere of influence: the individualistic pop/rock goddess. For example, Del Rey — who is more interested in science than feminism — writes personal material, and the image she projects is of a bad girl who knows she’s bad but limits herself from taking things too far. “She’s Amy Winehouse with the safety on,” Hopper proffers in her “Deconstructing Lana Del Rey” essay. Del Rey aligns with Manson’s ability to be both righteous yet fallible. We can follow a line from Manson to Gaga, who enveloped her own sense of weirdness, and harnessed it in attracting all types of Little Monsters to follow her. Now there’s the concern she’s becoming too “normal.” “‘Weirdness’ soon became, of all things, ‘the norm,’” New York Magazine’s Lindsay Zoladz writes on an essay about what Gaga has represented.
“I think the one great thing maybe my band ever did do was, we did sort of come from an outsider’s status,” Manson told the A.V. Club in 2012. “I think people that got turned on by us were probably excited themselves. So these artists, like Lady Gaga or Katy Perry, have gone on to realize their own desires, probably, arguably from also an outsider’s status.” Manson continued, “Maybe they felt like outsiders too, so our influence has maybe been encouraging them to press on and do what they want with their lives, which clearly they have, to an unbelievable extent.”
Despite watching the mainstream success of so many post-Manson artists, it’s worth noting the limits of how her image has resonated. Rock music is notoriously dominated by bands made of white men, so her presence has had an importance influence on women seeking to make their mark in the genre. But there are still so few women of color in rock music — with Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard being a notable exception — who are being heard by a wider audience that it’s harder to speculate about what impact, if any, Manson may have had on them.
What’s easier to pin down is Manson’s sense of generosity — not righteousness — when it comes to the women in music who have come after her. She explained to The A.V. Club, “I watch these young women try to navigate our culture, and I watch them struggle, or I watch the unbelievable hostility they have to bear.” She also told off Kanye West for being patronizing when Beyoncé lost to Beck for Album of the Year at the Grammy’s: “I am pretty certain Beyoncé doesn’t need you fighting any battles on her account. Seems like she’s got everything covered perfectly well on her own.” Manson also stuck up for Del Rey, who the media has deemed to be inauthentic. “She has a past? God forbid, they lambasted her for having a musical past,” she told Vanity Fair. “It’s good she’s failed and she had the wherewithal to try again. Shouldn’t we be applauding her for that?”
During the interview with Spin, Aaron asks Manson if she gets along with women or men better. “I think I get on well with both men and women. I’m not a player on either side, and I think that’s maybe why people find my lyrics a little mysterious. I don’t think women are superior beasts; we have disgusting impulses just like men.” Her egalitarian tenet of not spewing bile about men nor condemning women for their lasciviousness, and basically not alienating anybody, generated universality (and feminism) in her music.
Manson hasn’t always been embraced. In the interview with Vanity Fair, she discussed how after the initial success of Garbage, she was accused of being fake, even though she’d played in different bands before. In 1997 she said a similar thing to Spin: “I think there’s a general perception that the guys [in the band] are all these genius producers and I’m some kind of doltish trollop.” She goes on to say how people assume she’s not smart, because it’s easier for people to think she’s “the face of the clock and the boys are working the gears.” Back then even Manson’s friends asked her if she really did write her own songs. “For some reason, even they [my friends] want to think this is someone else’s achievement,” she said. Women today, especially Del Rey, are still constantly questioned about their authenticity, but Manson stood up for her rights and didn’t allow the media and the male paradigm to control her, which has allowed other women to speak up for themselves and have a voice.
Curated image or otherwise, Manson showed her fans it was okay to occasionally have smudged eyeliner, and to be comfortable with a kind of femininity that didn’t need to learn its cues from men. Manson may not speak for all women, but she did offer a compelling entry to the list of figures who can be called feminist rock icons. Twenty years later Manson’s greatest legacy is she continues to be an advocate for women in rock, in that she doesn’t fuel Miley/Nikki type beefs, but instead invites everybody — including men — to be a part of her sphere.
