was fake. In the mid-1990s, when a rock band was meant to wear Chuck Taylors and ripped jeans, publicly fret over the power gap between itself and the audience, and above all insist that the best thing art could do was remind everyone of the worst things about being alive—when all of this was called authenticity, and its performance was prized more than the performance of a monster riff—they were flagrantly inauthentic. They wrote big, garish alt-rock songs with choruses that what they saw as alt-rock’s garishly romanticized depression.
Their albums sounded like they cost a million dollars to make; . Where other artists confessed or pleaded, Garbage teased, wrapping the radio up in a pink feather boa and blowing their listeners a kiss. And somehow, strangely, they were old, at least in pop-music terms: Singer Shirley Manson, the youngest, the one whose stage manner would soon have male rock critics bug-eyed and howling , was nearly 30 when the band released their first album in 1995.
Age was Garbage’s greatest asset, and it was the secret to their artistic success. It freed them from the pressures of having to play the tedious cred games that had been embroiling 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 her band Angelfish’s vi.