5pm_weds | one-hundred and thirteen (Reply)

What Girls Are Made Of
Garbage
Not Your Kind of People (Deluxe Version)
2012

Seeing Garbage perform was all the exclamation points. Standing in that crowd, shouting out the lyrics, jumping because I just couldn't contain my excitement--I felt like a teenager at her first concert. I remember having this picture of Shirley Manson pasted on one of my binders in high school and thinking that she was just about the coolest, toughest, not-afraid-to-share-her-opinion woman ever. The images I collaged on my agenda and binders were not only an expression of what I liked or who I was, but a kind of talisman. Toting those images around with me was reassuring, in a way; they were a protection, a reminder that people had managed to create and thrive under any number of circumstances.

I would have loved "What Girls Are Made Of" when I was in my last few years of high school, when I was just forming my own ideas about feminism and what it meant to identify as "feminist". I like that this song emphasizes the strength of women and doesn't hide or shame uniquely female experiences like, say, getting your period, "We can bleed for a whole week straight/Every month, and the pain doesn't faze us". It's strange, especially when I was a teenager, how embarrassed I was about getting my period (I feel that I wasn't alone in this). I was ridiculously stealth about it. Like God forbid anybody see me in the bathroom holding a...pad! And now, here's a song that's like, whatever, it's cool; it's pretty awesome that we (the collective female, we) just deal with it.

That, and I loved songs with well-timed, well-placed swear words. Something like:

Do you really think I give a shit about anything you said
Or what you ever did?
Say what you want, but I'm not listening
'Cause I'm not fucking about

would have had me snarling into an invisible microphone in front of my bedroom mirror (when I was home alone, of course; swear words--hearing them, saying them--inevitably made me feel guilty, haha).

I love that this song opens with a strong bass line. It sounds like a curled lip and an arched eyebrow. The lyrics eviscerate. And, while being driven to drink isn't necessarily the healthiest response to another person's actions, the speaker is not a passive, wilting, delicate flower. She threatens:

Watch me cutting every string
One by one
See me cut out all the rot
Bit by bit

she stomps her feet, she is heard and doesn't give herself up to defeat.