1998: Version 2.0, Garbage
By Masooma Hussain
It starts with a faint twinkle. The seductive beat of a digital drum machine before Shirley Manson snarls an intimate and sinister confession: “I’ll tell you something, I am a wolf but I like to wear sheep’s clothing.”
It’s 1999 and I’m holding my breath in the backseat of my dad’s leased Audi as he whips down Yonge street. Sometimes when he drives fast it feels like we’re flying. Other times it fills me with dread— like I’m an object recklessly hurtling through space. That’s when I shut my eyes, telling myself nothing bad can happen to me— I’m not really here. I am floating above, out of harm’s way.
I could usually guess if Dad was in a fun mood or a furious one based on the music he chose, but this Garbage album was hard to read. I found its glitchy, techno sound frightening, but I resonated with the pop melodies that cut through the noise. The hazard-orange cover is indelible, the quilted pattern resembling plastic cushions. I would run my fingers over the jewel case, wondering how the photographed texture would feel to the touch: firm, or giving, or both? I perused the liner notes, hoping for clues into my 32-year-old father’s state of mind. As he pushed the volume and acceleration to their limits, my 8-year-old body contained unease and thrill in varying measures.
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Garbage released Version 2.0 at the nexus of the grunge 90s and digital optimism-cum-anxiety of the new millennium. The band faced an immense pressure to recreate the mainstream success of their 1995 debut, but they also longed to evolve. They balanced these desires by using futuristic electronic production to build on their musical foundations. Singer and lyricist Shirley Manson told Billboard in 2018 that Version 2.0 came “from an analog mindset, but it utilizes this new technology”. It’s one of the first albums to be recorded and mixed almost entirely using Pro Tools: a digital workstation that’s known as an industry standard today, but in the late 1990s it was a relatively new and untested playground. In a 2017 interview with Backspin, founding member and producer Butch Vig said this technology brought about “new ways to inject ideas into the music that wasn’t possible before.”
The band interpolated classic pop songs on the record by formative influences like The Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” on the track “Push It” and The Pretenders’ “Talk of the Town” on “Special.” Interpolation can get a bad rap when credits and copyrights are murky, but I love hearing the echoes of a familiar song woven into a new one, especially when meaningfully contextualized like Garbage does here. By borrowing from the “bands who built [them] as human beings”, as Manson framed it in a 1998 interview with CMJ New Music Monthly, the original songs are transmuted into something fresh in an act of referential reinvention. Manson and Vig told Billboard in 1998 that their goal was to make the album a “rapprochement between high-tech and lowdown, the now sound and golden memories.”
Futuristic media from the past can easily feel dated, but this album feels timeless— like a dispatch from its own dimension. Version 2.0 taps into a new way of understanding the forces that created you, realizing that they stumble towards self-actualization in the same way you do.
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It makes sense this album elicited confusing feelings in me as a kid. The contrast of childlike innocence with heavy pulsing darkness is by design. It’s full of juxtapositions: molasses and gunmetal, sunshine and microchips. Even its creation was twisted: the working title for the album was Sad Alcoholic Clowns, and many of the beats were recorded in an abandoned candy factory. Garbage loves a “dark lyric disguised by a happy pop melody.”
The single “When I Grow Up” exemplifies this complexity, with catchy ba-ba-ba’s punctuating lyrical double meanings like “happy hours / Golden showers.” My dad and I would sing along to this one together: “When I grow up, I’ll be stable. When I grow up, I’ll turn the tables.” I remember thinking there’s no way Dad can relate to this song like I can. He’s an adult, what kind of growing up could he be making plans for? At the time I didn’t realize that “when I grow up” is a perpetual state, one of delusion. Perhaps it’s childish to anticipate a benchmark in your life when things will be settled, when you’ll have everything figured out. Growing up brings the realization that fumbling your way through life is an eternal process. That your responsibilities may forever overshadow your capacity. As Manson told CMJ in 1998: “even though you think you’re sussed and you’re smart and you’ve worked it all out, you haven’t even got the remotest inkling of what it’s all about. And you can never hope to.”
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My dad spent his youth sleeping by hospital beds and speeding down highways. As a child, I didn’t understand the scope of the serious “adult stuff’ he was dealing with, like illness, insurance, and loans. My dad moved our family from Pakistan to the U.S. to Canada in search of sufficient care for his perennially ill mother. My grandmother’s health had been unstable nearly as long as I’d been alive but my father remembered a time when she was vibrant and boisterous, and so his reality was shaped by a different dissonance than mine. The more he feared losing his mother, the more he lashed out at his daughter. The year Version 2.0 came into our lives was the same year my grandmother moved into our home in Toronto, a home we had just immigrated to the year before. My father became reactive under the stress of balancing his responsibilities, ultimately taking his frustrations out on me. He had once encouraged my curiosity, relishing the role of teacher with patience and kindness, but now any question I asked was met with fury. He slammed doors and yelled at me and my mom beyond what I knew him to be capable of. I didn’t recognize this man in our house with the short fuse and no sympathy. I felt constantly in the way, like my needs were at odds with what he needed to make it through each day. I learned to suppress most of my needs, except the need to be loved by him. I decided I would be helpful by being silent. I’d rather be a ghost than a burden.
Dad’s emotional outlet to deal with his stress was driving fast and blasting music, especially to “Push It” by Garbage. I will forever associate this song with my father’s rage: “I was angry when I met you / I think I’m angry, still.” It seemed to unlock something primal in him. I’d be in the backseat white knuckling it and closing my eyes as he accelerated into the bombastic chorus: “Push it / Make the beats go harder.” I participated in his catharsis when the throbbing music synced up with his speed, like I understood the rush he’s chasing. Sometimes I’d push down on the floor with my feet as if I were willing the acceleration myself. Mostly I felt a loss of control, the pit of my stomach dropping as the car sped up. “Don’t worry baby, no need to fight/ Don’t worry baby, it’ll be alright.” I was not soothed by this refrain. I did not trust that it would be alright. I feared my father’s recklessness and that he didn’t consider me at all. I remember wondering how I could act differently in order to receive different treatment. As if any of it was in my control, when it was barely in his.
There’s a paradox that comes up as a child when your safe person, in my case my Dad, ends up being a source of fear. Attachment expert Diane Poole Heller refers to this conflicting experience as “having one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake.” This dynamic can form a disorganized pattern of attachment in a child who learns to seek comfort from the person who poses a threat to their wellbeing. As a kid, this can look like a deep need for closeness to the parent clashing with the drive to detach from a dangerous and confusing caregiver—both impulses are means of survival. Into adulthood, this can manifest as an emotional hostage situation: the desire for intimacy conflicting with the fear of it.
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I came back around to listening to Version 2.0 around age 27, once most of my molecules had been replaced and rearranged. I formed my own relationships to the songs outside of my dad’s influence. I realized this album didn’t just speed, thump, and terrify— now it felt like melting, like waking, like enduring.
On the album’s closing track “You Look So Fine,” I found the opposing force to my father’s mach speed. The song is musical quicksand, pulling you in without resistance. It speaks to an early lesson I learned, that one way to avoid the discomfort of mistreatment is going with the flow and accepting that extreme turmoil is a component of love: “Let’s pretend, happy end.” The way the strings come in as Manson sings “you’re taking me over” sound like sweeping surrender. By the time I rediscovered this album as an adult, I was no stranger to losing myself in hurt, hurling myself into coping mechanisms that cannibalized my judgment and my dignity.
When I was a kid I assumed every “you” addressed in a song was the same ubiquitous You, like a musical god purposed to receive our intentions. Listening to “Special” after outgrowing that belief resulted in a revelation. “Do you have an opinion? / A mind of your own? / I thought you were special. / I thought you should know.” I recognized the “you” as myself at my most self-destructive, stubborn, catatonic, and deluded. I should have chosen myself instead of holding onto compromised relationships. I had run out of patience with myself, missing who I used to be. A familiar refrain echoed from Chrissie Hyndes’ pen to Shirley Manson’s tongue to my ears: “We were the talk of the town.”
If “Special” is the wake up call, then “The Trick Is To Keep Breathing” is the pep talk, a fortifying promise: “I won’t be the one that’s going to let you down / Maybe you’ll get what you want this time around.” Manson’s inspiration for this song was a novel of the same name by Scottish author Janice Galloway about Joy Stone, a 27 year old numb to her depression. Joy searches for meaning and identity in relationships, substances, and literature, hoping: “Maybe I will be embraced, entered, made to exist.” Instead of recognizing her circumstances, Joy exists in a suspended state of self-blame and self-doubt, convinced she is the problem. As I read the novel, I encountered flashes of familiarity in Joy’s confessions and felt connected to Manson who must have found similar solace in it. Ultimately, Joy’s journey as a protagonist is to forgive herself, releasing herself from the burden of paralyzing people-pleasing. She’s meant to learn that making yourself small for the sake of survival kills you slowly all the same.
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“And still you call me co-dependent / Somehow you lay the blame on me.”
- “Medication”
Manson wrote “Medication” after a harrowing experience with the American healthcare system, an institutional example of a thread running through the album: The provider of your care being the source of your devastation. In a 1998 interview with Australian outlet Triple J, Manson points to the U.S. privatized healthcare system as a sign of an inhumane society: “If a country can’t prove to its people that it cares about them how can they possibly expect society to be happy and healthy and safe?” She explained to Juice magazine in 1998 that “Medication” is about putting “blame on yourself for things that you had no control of at the time, and finally pushing off and realizing that this was not my fault.” It’s about the relief that comes after, when you’re in a position to look back on your devastation and liberate yourself from limiting beliefs. Though the album seems dark, “it’s really about survival and overcoming negative circumstances.”
Reflecting on darkness and putting it into writing was new to Manson at the time. She joined Garbage once much of their self-titled debut was already written, meaning Version 2.0 not only solidified the band as a cohesive unit, it also affirmed 30-year-old Manson as their sole lyricist. In a 1998 profile in The Independent, Manson describes the songwriting process as "metamorphosis, alchemy - you take something dark and it comes out beautiful. Before, I had no expression at all, no voice. But when you write, you expel the waste from your body.” This kind of emotional release is possible on the other side of challenging experiences, once you’re in a position of relative safety. In the same interview, Manson points to the band’s chemistry and the security they felt around each other when making this album that enabled this creative exploration to take place: “Butch, Duke, and Steve have allowed me to tap something that was previously squashed inside, eating me alive, and they've never said a cruel word to me, never once made me feel small or embarrassed or diminished.”
Version 2.0 was before its time but lives in the “after,” in the wake of the new millennium. “The whole record is about traveling,” Manson told Juice in 1998, “It’s about survival, jumping across a crevasse and then looking back at what you’ve just leapt over and thinking, my God, did I jump that?” It captures the layered dissonance of holding onto the old while embracing the new, letting traces of your foundational influences reverberate into the present. Manson told CMJ in 1998 that she ties her urge to become a musician back to loneliness: “I think you’re looking for an echo - it’s about recognition, about reassurance, and about affirmation. I think that’s what music’s all about.”
These days my father and I are in a much more stable and communicative place. I’m a lot like him, and a lot more like myself. We’ve coped in our ways, father and daughter with a shared desire to transcend materiality —his efforts to outrun it and mine to let it pass me by. He always thought he’d muscle through the struggle, that one day he wouldn’t live in survival mode. Now it’s clear that’s all there is. I’m the same age as he was when faced with all these responsibilities, barely able to take care of myself let alone being sandwiched between a fading parent and a growing child. I don’t blame him for how he dealt with it all. But I don’t blame myself, either.
I recently asked my dad what feelings came up for him when I mentioned this album. I thought of our thrill rides, the hazard-orange case, the slinky pulsing soundscape. What was his headspace at the time? He took a moment to think. “Freedom,” he eventually said. “It felt exciting. Yes, I felt trapped by our circumstances, but we had just moved here and I also felt the newness of possibility.”
I pressed him further.
“Honestly?” he said, “I just liked driving fast and playing it loud.”
Masooma Hussain is a writer and musician from Toronto. She has written on the TV shows Workin’ Moms and The Way Home, and for publications including The Toast, With/out Pretend, and GUTS magazine. She is currently working on her debut album, among other things.