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Garbage
Before we move on to more intelligent things, let’s start with the obvious; what’s with the name? Why would a band want to call themselves ‘Garbage’? It doesn’t make my job any easier when I try to turn some unfamiliar soul on to their music, I’ll tell you that.
Me: “Hey, are you familiar with Garbage? I think they’re great.”
Response: “Just about everything on the radio is garbage these days” or, “I spend most of my life trying to avoid garbage” or, “Why, because they admit they’re garbage?”
…and on and on…
It is an unfortunate name, isn’t it? I have a hard time trying to conceive how the bandmembers managed to agree on it. Was it by committee? If this was the best name on their short list, I don’t even want to know what names were thrown out (pardon the inexcusable pun). One good thing about the name, though, is that it demands conviction. You can’t casually like garbage. You’ve got to be emphatic about it – “Dammit, I like Garbage!!”
And, dammit, I really do. Of all the bands that are trying to squeeze whatever blood might remain from the pop music stone, none are doing a more consistently entertaining job than Garbage. They operate on the premise that there’s precious little left under the sun that can be considered ‘new’, so they alchemize history with modern technology. With patience and exacting measurement, a new substance sometimes results, as songs like “Stupid Girl” prove quite handily. Many of the song’s bits and pieces have an air of familiarity but when they are put together in a new shape, the results are quite unique and engaging. Garbage stands head and shoulders above the current school of sampler musicians who are grave-robbing for glory, because they start out with song ideas, not just sounds. Cool sounds aren’t an end unto themselves. Garbage has an almost old-fashioned respect for traditional song structure, which means that their material is usually intelligent enough to take you someplace, with their found sounds serving the song rather than being the reason for the song’s existence.
The band consists of three technically obsessed knob twiddlers (producers Butch Vig, Steve Marker and Duke Erikson) who compulsively manipulate the music, and one live-wire, spontaneous frontperson (Shirley Manson) who injects life into their belabored constructions. Despite all of the tinkering, there are real songs beneath their sonic smorgasbord. Listening to “Stupid Girl”, I’m convinced that it could have been a hit for a conventional rock band, – it’s not hard to imagine Neil Young and Crazy Horse ripping their way through this (although Neil already wrote a song called “Stupid Girl”, didn’t he?). Familiarity and originality co-habitating the same piece of music? Garbage operates from the principle that there is precious little else left to do. Pop has eaten itself, maybe even more than once. ‘N Sync, Britney Spears, Celine Dion and the large majority of others who dominate the pop charts are like the fourth stomach of the cow, regurgitating something that has already been digested and re-digested until there is nothing but mush left to work with. What makes Garbage special (you know, with that last analogy, their name is starting to make sense to me) is that they toss off the standard formula for pop ‘digestion’. They don’t wait for the contents to safely cycle their way through the usual glandular procedure. Instead, they cannibalize the beast...no, they slash it to pieces and then stitch it back together, only some parts are no longer where you’d expect them to be. It may not be as efficient, but what comes out is a lot more interesting…My God, this is disgusting, let’s forget the ‘cow’ analogy. How about fine art? Okay, then, a Garbage song is like a cubist painting, culled from a multiple of perspectives that forces the listener to re-address the subject as an entirely new entity. Even if that analogy is no better, what is interesting is that this oblique analysis applies to a pop band that manages to survive in a marketplace dominated by Ricky Martin and Shania Twain. Hearing the aural equivalent of a woman with three breasts and an arm coming out of her torso might be odd, but it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than trice-digested mush.
 
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