Queer (song) - Composition

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 " work when you're trying to write a song and put it in a context that works". Vig's inspiration for "Queer" came from a novel he had read about "about this woman who was hired to go and make this guy's son a 'man'. The kid is missing a few marbles. But then he realizes that the women who came to his room is also fucking his father."

After Marker saw Shirley Manson's group Angelfish on 120 Minutes, the band invited her to Vig and Marker's Smart Studios to sing on a couple of songs. One of the compositions was "Queer", whose incomplete lyrics forced Manson to ad-lib in an audition that was described as "dreadful". The singer afterwards returned to Angelfish, which folded shortly later. Manson eventually returned to Smart for a successful second audition, and then begun working on the songs Vig, Marker and Erikson had created. Manson rewrote "Queer" into a trip-hop arrangement, and added ambiguous lyrics that allowed the listener to make up their own mind about what the song was about. She also re-sung the "Queer" vocal in an understated style. It was then that the band knew that Garbage was going to work.

Garbage incorporated a sample of the drumline from New Zealand band Single Gun Theory's track "Man of Straw" on "Queer"; this loop was layered with an additional drum part performed by Madison percussionist Clyde Stubblefield, who was known for being the most sampled drummer in history for his uncredited part on James Brown's "Funky Drummer". Vig opted to hire Stubblefield to play on the record rather than sample him as "you don't use a sample when the genius who played the sample lives down the street from you", and the drummer also contributed to album cut "Not My Idea". Bass guitar parts were completed by Milwaukee session bassist Mike Kashou. The band wanted to sample a clarinet part from a Frank Sinatra record, but the licensing for the sample would have been prohibitively expensive. Mulling over some options, such as having a session musician interpolate the part themselves still led to having to pay a large royalties. The idea was dropped. The band still liked the idea of using a clarinet, and recorded a part by Les Thimming on the final mix.

Manson later explained, "It's not, as you might think, to do with being gay, but tolerance. My granny has the expression 'Or's queer, except thee and me, and sometimes even thee's queer', that is that you think you are normal and the rest of the world is freaky, but we're all equally to blame". Garbage did not write the song to particularly appeal to the gay community, however Erikson stated: "As musicians, we're totally open to . There's been enough exposure to gay issues in the mainstream media that people are finally ready to deal with it. Even if it's something controversial, people are still beginning to open up". Erikson added: "The song isn't about sex at all, it's about the loss of innocence".