Supervixen
A Tribute to Shirley Manson
At some point in the very early 1990s I got my own bedroom. My brother had moved into the little box room beside the one we had shared. His room was half filled by a box-bed that had storage and a place you could play beneath it, if you were small enough to fit under there. I now had the larger room to myself. This inequity is a source of guilt and shame to me in later life, but I’ll tackle that in therapy rather than in essay form.
As soon as I got my own room I decided to start a new tradition of listening to the weekly music charts on Sunday. I was inevitably disappointed each time. I didn’t understand why out of the top 40, there were never more than five songs I actually enjoyed. I pressed on with this tradition for a while, since I had a tendency to perform a type of personality I thought said something about me, even in private. I probably thought listening to the charts made me sophisticated. But even this kind of motivation couldn’t stand up to the terrible music that swamped the radio, and I had given it up by 1994. However, I was aware that after a certain time of day the music on the radio got much better. This is a thing in England. Most of what is broadcast by British media before 8pm is insultingly shit.
So I started listening late at night with headphones. There was a rock show, a Hip Hop show, which I wasn’t ready for yet. I largely listened to a phone-in on local radio where they talked about God and ghosts and moral dilemmas. Then, one day, my friend Oliver told me about a show called The Evening Session. I think his older sister used to listen to it. This was Steve Lamacq’s slot on BBC Radio One. He principally played indie music and what the media would soon begin to call Brit Pop. I only liked a minority of what he played, but it was a show where he got to program exactly what he wanted, and this automatically made it far more interesting than the daytime shows, which all played the same songs every hour.
The first couple of weeks after I discovered The Evening Session I was really excited. Mostly because I was deeply touched by a song by The Wannadies, called Might Be Stars. This was a song about wanting to propel yourself into the sphere where pop takes place. It described the fantasy for a million boys and girls like me — learn the guitar, form a band, get a deal, become a star and live forever. Of course, I didn’t know I loved it until the end of the first chorus, and by the time I found a blank cassette tape it was almost over.
The next day I tuned in and waited for him to play the song again. The programme was long though, and I must have lost my focus because I didn’t get the intro of the song on my tape. I decided that I would record the whole show next time.
Unfortunately the show that I recorded did not feature the Wannadies song at all.
I remember little about what was on that recording, except for one song. It was a track I really didn’t like at first. In fact, I thought I hated it. It’s often this way with pop music, and I later discovered it is true with art in general. Henry Moore said something articulate about it that is quoted in the V&A. Essentially what he says is that you will sometimes have a reaction so strong that you get confused and think that it is negative. You think you are rejecting something because it is bad, but in fact it is because it is speaking to you on a level you can’t immediately accept.
The song didn’t sound like most of the music Lamaq played. It had a groove that I associated more with dance music or electronic music, and though guitars were featured they weren’t the core of the song and they didn’t sound like indie guitars. In addition, the vocalist was a woman and the lyrics were starkly sexual and threatening at the same time.
I had the feeling that if my parents heard me listening to this song I would be in some kind of trouble, so I listened with headphones. And I listened often. I didn’t know who this woman was yet, but she was both soft and hard. She was sexy but mean. She was singing sweetly at times, almost whispering and growling at others. And under all of this there was something damaged or desperate.
Hey boy, take a look at me. Let me dirty up your mind.
*****
In the mid-nineties Shirely Manson was around 30 years old. She was playing in a band almost nobody had heard of, and was invited to audition with a group put together by Butch Vig. According to pop music lore, she didn’t know who Butch Vig was, so the band told her to check the credits of her copy of Nevermind — an album the entire world owned at that time.
Now, the story of Garbage is all over the internet, so I don’t intend to retell it in any detail. What I want to talk about is the way that Shirley Manson came into a group that already existed and so completely made it her own. Garbage had already written and demoed the music for most of the songs on their first record before she joined the band. They sent her a copy of the tracks to her home in Scotland, and she wrote melodies and lyrics for them. I believe that some of the songs already had vocal parts, but that she in most cases changed them to a greater or lesser extent.
What she did is come into a male band and make a record that is carried by this incredible female persona. In many ways that persona is a perfect 90s creation. The songs are full of confidence, but built around emotional dysfunction. I can’t have understood this record properly when I was a kid, but I now believe that each time I listened to the CD, Manson was (re-)programming my sexuality to make room for the image of a complex, challenging, difficult and sexually demanding woman.
Case in point is the opening song on the debut record, Supervixen, which opens with over-compressed drums and a fantastic electric guitar riff with a counterintuitive half-beat of silence. Manson’s first words on the record are the seductive but slightly surreal instruction, “Come down to my house, stick a stone in your mouth.” Her Scottish accent is just detectable. The chorus of the song sees her character encouraging the listener to make a new religion with her at the centre, promising to “feed your obsession.” The song ends with a return to the opening riff, and Manson singing, “Bow down to me,” repeatedly over the top. From Nick Cave to Pattie Smith, rock music needs demigods. Shirley Manson’s version was frightening and sexy and wounded.
In the video for the single Queer, which was the song I had heard on the radio, she took this a step further. Dressed in a silk dress, with way too much eye liner on, looking like the goth girl from town who you are too scared to talk to, she beckons the camera through a street and into a house, where she pins the viewer to the floor, tears off his clothes, shaves his head and — I think it is strongly implied — sexually assaults him while her band mates look on.
It’s interesting to think about how the viewer of the video is constructed as male. In the video we see the character the camera plays. First at the beginning, when he is a kind of dandy, and again at the end, when his encounter with Manson has functioned as some kind of revelation and turned him into a blissed out wandering monk. It’s a weird twist on the male gaze, where the viewer is violated and made helpless by the object of desire.
At other times in Garbage’s music, Manson takes a more vulnerable position. This is especially true on their second record, where she deals with themes of bullying and humiliation. The music on that album became more electronic, even more polished, further removed from the alternative rock world that had made Butch Vig’s name, and whilst I do like that record, it doesn’t have the same alchemical magic for me as the first album. For me, the ultimate synthesis of the two sides of Manson’s persona are on the last two tracks of the debut record. Both are songs of longing and express the belief that a damaged narrator could be saved by love.
Things don’t have to be this way. Catch me on a better day.
Fix Me Now, the penultimate song demonstrates what a great singer Manson is. She growls the verses in the back of her throat, but sings the choruses with this powerful, naive alto that sounds almost like a girl-pop record or a 70s radio hit. There is a desperation to the performance that makes it easy to believe that Manson felt that longing for someone who could make her whole, help her manage her mood swings and difficult behaviour. Someone who would kiss her blind.
But maybe the best Garbage song is the closer, Milk. And perhaps the best version is not the one on the album, but the remix Tricky did, which was featured on the CD single, and later used on the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. Shirley Manson’s narrator describes herself both as “red hot kitchen,” and “cool as the deep blue ocean,” and for me this combination always made a perfect symbolist kind of sense. She is lost, she says, so she is cruel. “But I’d be love and sweetness, if I had you.” And even this sounds a little like a threat.
The chorus of the song, where Manson sings repeatedly that she is waiting for someone, is simple but heart-breaking. My hunch is that the “you” she is waiting for is as yet undefined. A person who can heal her, but whom she has never met. Maybe that’s my lonely teenage self talking, but listening to the song today can still hurt. It’s hope in hopelessness and strength in vulnerability.
Garbage are still a band, and Manson is still a singer, and I’m fairly sure they all do an excellent job of what they do. But I can’t be the same kind of audience I was back then. I will never be 14 again, and my heart will never be so open to a woman too adult to understand, pouring a confusing collection of emotions into a music that is equally hybrid, preparing me for the complex ways in which other people will appeal to parts of me I didn’t know existed. The stars aligned at just the right time to prevent me being in any way cynical about a strange and beautiful woman from my mother’s country, singing that she was only happy when it rained.
