The trash was fake. In the mid-1990s, when a rock band was about to wear Chuck Taylors and ripped jeans, he publicly worried about the power gap between himself and the audience and, above all, insisted that the best thing he could do art was to remind everyone of the worst things about being alive – when it was all called authenticity and performing it was more valuable than performing a monster riff – it was blatantly unreliable. They wrote big, fancy alt-rock songs with choruses that mocked what they saw as alt-rock's fancy romantic depression. Their albums sounded like they cost a million dollars to make. The videos cost them a million dollars to make. Where other artists confessed or pleaded, Garbage teased, wrapping the radio in a pink feather boa and blowing their listeners a kiss. And somehow, surprisingly, they were old, at least in pop music terms: Singer Shirley Manson, the youngest, the one whose stage demeanor would soon have male rock critics gasping and screaming. awoogahe was almost 30 when the band released their first album in 1995.
Age was Garbage's greatest asset and was the secret of their artistic success. It freed them from the pressures of having to play the tiresome cred games that had been involved in 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 the band's video for Angelfish first and only time. Vig himself, at 40, was arguably the most important music producer in the world, fresh off a string of records so epochal their titles can still be recognized without reference to the artists who made them: Gis, It does not matter, Bricks are heavy, Bromic, Siamese Dream. Having arguably done more than anyone else to bring the DIY ethos of the early 90s indie scene to people around the world, he washed his hands of the whole thing and went to work making his own music.
With Erickson and Marker, his latest partner in Madison, Wisconsin's Smart Studios, Vig was commissioned to remix bands such as Nine Inch Nails and U2. They stripped things down to the vocals and refilled the empty space with freshly recorded guitar, growling feedback, found sound samples, processed keys, digital junk and whatever else they could think of. Vig already knew a lot about the trick of making a band sound alive and overwhelmingly present on a record. On It does not matterhad used what Krist Novoselic called “electronic technique” to elevate Kurt Cobain's performances, stitching the vocals together to give the impression of a single cohesive take. If you could do it with a song, why not build a band the same way—not by making demos or jamming your buds in the garage, but by playing on the computer?
