Trash

The guitars arrive before anything else makes sense — two of them, detuned just enough to feel wrong in the best possible way, scraping against each other like chrome on asphalt. "Trash" is The New York Dolls at their most confrontational and their most seductive simultaneously, a song that wears its shabbiness like a designer coat. David Johansen's voice is pure Manhattan gutter poetry, nasally insinuating, somewhere between a taunt and a come-on, delivering syllables with the timing of someone who knows exactly how much contempt they can pack into a single drawled vowel. The rhythm section doesn't so much keep time as lurch forward, always slightly off-balance, which is entirely the point — this band was never about precision, it was about attitude as musical philosophy. There's a proto-punk aggression here that predates punk by several years, a sense that the whole thing could collapse into noise at any moment but never does, held together by sheer theatrical will. Lyrically it circles around a specific kind of New York lowlife romanticism, the glamour of the discarded, people and things the straight world throws away. You reach for this song when you want to feel like the most interesting person in a room that hasn't been built yet, circa 1973, wearing something inappropriate for the weather.