Garbage.

If you don't think Butch Vig's almost singlehandedly invented two decades of alternative rock as we know it, just look at his resumé: Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, Green Day, Jimmy Eat World, Foo Fighters, AFI. That's without mentioning his membership in the still-cool Garbage or the fact he produced a little generational totem called Nevermind. From grunge to "electronica" to emo, he's probably building someone's entire adolescence from scratch as we speak. He free-associated for Village Voice about some of his biggest hits, underrated discoveries and Garbage's own new album Not Your Kind of People, which drops this week.

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Gish-era Smashing Pumpkins: Reissued in 2011, so it counts!

Reports from the holiday-party front indicate that 2011 was another long and lonely year for the fiction writers and memoirists of New York, who were kept company at home all day long mainly by various "internet friends" and related applications, as well as their favorite songs/albums/radio shows. Below is a totally non-scientific list of 2011's Top 10 pieces of music for writing, as supplied by the authors of recent books.

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In the above video, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar slam-dunks a pumpkin in honor of the Smashing Pumpkins, because the Internet demands absurdist content to feed its perpetual-motion machine. I would have preferred a recreation of the Airplane! scene where some smartass kid starts smack-talking Kareem-in-disguise's basketball skills while the former Laker is pursuing his side career as a pilot, if only because it would allow lead Pumpkin Billy Corgan to play up his "biggest heel of the '90s" side that is quite enjoyable to watch from afar, but we all have to take what we can get these days.

Our corporate siblings on the other side of the country have the line on "Owata," the newest--10th, if you're counting--song to surface from the Smashing Pumpkins' 44-track Teargarden By Kaleidyscope. "Owata" finds alt-rock superheel Billy Corgan and his mates (Mike Byrne on drums, Nicole Fiorentino on bass, Jeff Schroeder on guitar) in sweet-as-pie pop mode, lining up synths and a singalong-ready chorus then placing a guitar solo that's pretty much straight out of the heartstring-plucking playbook smack in the middle of the whole thing. After tomorrow morning, the song'll be available for free download at the band's official site along with the other Teargarden tracks.

On Friday Cee-Lo debuted a delightful new song with the simplest, most uncouth title possible: "Fuck You." It immediately joined the upper echelons of a surprisingly crowded genre -- from 50 Cent to Pharoahe Monch, the Avengers to Pussy Galore, Lil Kim to Atmosphere, there are lots of songs named "Fuck You" or immediate permutations thereof ("Fuck You Lucy," "I Love You, But Fuck You," and so on). Here are 10 of the best.

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Common

Ellen DeGeneres Sinead O'Connor

Jeff Tweedy

Smashing Pumpkins

Voodoo Music Festival
New Orleans
October 26 through 28
All photos by Mark C. Austin

More photos from Voodoo below.

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