“We were in the right place at the right time and we were making the right kind of music. I’m the right kind of voice. I had the right look. It wasn’t that we were brilliant. I have friends who could have peed all over our talent”
As she rifles through neat piles of iron-on patches, tarot-card decks, and baby-pink notebooks, Shirley Manson’s slowly graying undershave is visible beneath a fiery red bun. “My [7 year old] niece would love it here!” she declares, “here” being Junior High, a new feminist art-gallery-meets-community-space in East Hollywood. “Had I walked past on my own, I probably would have been too intimidated to come in.
For Manson, many of the music industry’s current megastars fail to pass her rock litmus test. “Rihanna is the closest thing we have in the pop world to a rockstar,” she muses, adding that she’s a huge fan of pop music. “If Rihanna wanted to make rock music, I’m sure she could. But unless you’re playing rock music, you’re not a rockstar.”
Following the overabundance of testosterone in the early grunge era, the mid-’90s saw the rise of the alternative girl — Alanis Morissette’s’ Jagged Little Pill, No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, and Björk’s Post all released the same year as the first Garbage record — and Manson became one of several potent figures for the female fans grunge had left behind.
“Now, our culture doesn’t value anything that’s not massive,” she says of music tastes today. “It seems like people are in awe of mass consumption. The bigger the artist, somehow the more special. That’s just not what I was brought up to believe in at all. I’ve never been a Taylor Swift, I’ve never been that famous. I can’t begin to imagine what that must be like. But you don’t get to that level accidentally — you court that level of success.
It helps that many feel Manson’s message hasn’t changed much. “Shirley is one of the few women musicians I looked up to in high school who didn’t go on to disappoint me,” said Cynthia Schemmer, a guitar player and songwriter for punk bands Radiator Hospital and Swanning. “A lot of women I looked up to kind of ‘got over’ feminism, or switched personas, and I feel like she really just stood her ground.
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