"Queer" | ||||||||||||||
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Single by Garbage | ||||||||||||||
from the album Garbage | ||||||||||||||
B-side | "Trip My Wire" "Butterfly Collector" |
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Released | October 23, 1995 (Australia & New Zealand) November 20, 1995 (UK) |
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Format |
7", 12", CD maxi, cassette single |
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Recorded | 1994–1995, Smart Studios (Madison, Wisconsin) | |||||||||||||
Genre | Alternative rock,downtempo,alternative pop,trip hop | |||||||||||||
Length | 4:36 | |||||||||||||
Label |
Mushroom Records UK Almo Sounds (North America) |
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Writer(s) | Garbage | |||||||||||||
Producer(s) | Garbage | |||||||||||||
Garbage singles chronology | ||||||||||||||
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"Queer" is a song written and produced by alternative rock band Garbage for the band's self-titled debut album. The song started as a demo during sessions between band members Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, and had its composition 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 structure.
In 1995, "Queer" was issued as the band's fourth single in the United Kingdom and second internationally. The song quickly became a modern rock success for the fledgling band, with positive reviews from music journalists, and becoming their first top 20 hit in both the UK Singles Chart and Billboard's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart. It also earned attention with its music video by Stéphane Sednaoui, which featured Manson detaining, stripping and shaving a man from a first-person perspective. The video earned much airplay on MTV and was nominated for Breakthrough Video at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards.
"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". 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 [sic] who came to his room is also fucking his father."