Queer

"Queer" is a song by American rock band Garbage from their self-titled debut studio album (1995). The song started as a demo during sessions between band members Butch Vig, Duke Erikson, and Steve Marker, and finished after singer Shirley Manson joined the band. Manson rewrote the sexualized lyrics to be more ambiguous, and rearranged the song into a subdued trip hop and rock crossover composition. In 1995, "Queer" was released as the band's second international single (fourth in the United Kingdom). The song quickly became a modern rock success for the fledgling band, with positive reviews from music journalists, and was Garbage's first top-20 in both the US Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart and on the UK Singles Chart. "Queer" also earned attention for its music video by Stéphane Sednaoui, which featured Manson detaining, stripping and shaving a man from a first-person perspective. The video clip gained significant airplay on MTV, was credited with presenting Garbage as a new, credible act with strong focus on visuals, and the following year was nominated for Breakthrough Video at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards. Composition "Queer" began as a rough demo around January 1994, recorded during informal studio sessions between Butch Vig, Duke Erikson, and Steve Marker in Marker's home basement recording studio in Madison, Wisconsin. The band had been jamming using an ADAT eight-track, AKAI samplers, and a small drum kit. The band had written around five songs that they felt were pretentious and lyrically simple and literal. They did not want Erikson to sing, even though he was a competent singer, because they wanted to avoid sounding like their previous band Spooner. Vig and Marker were uncomfortable with their vocals so tended to bury them deep in the mix or distort them with effects; on "Queer", Vig recorded a "scratch vocal" consisting of him screaming his way through. The recorded work was later discarded, which Vig explained was because the trio discovered that the musical experiments they were attempting "[don't] work when you're trying to write a song and put it in a context that works".