The Album Review Club – Week #2
Let It Be – The Replacements (1984)
Selected by
FogBlueInSanFran
View attachment 27561
Thanks,
@RobMCFC, for starting this thread and selecting me for a review.
I love The Who’s
Quadrophenia because it’s a story about a misfit kid trying to make his way in a world he feels is hopelessly stacked against him. When we were teenagers, I bet we almost all felt that way sometimes. We were also alternatively euphoric, depressed, weird, serious, ashamed, uncomfortable, embarrassed, brave, immature, goofy and introspective day to day and hour to hour.
The record I’ve chosen is a reflection of all those conflicts and mix-ups. It’s
Let It Be by The Replacements, whom Rolling Stone once labeled as “the greatest band that never was.”
The Mats, as aficionados know them, were a ragged, semi-talented garage band who crawled out from under Minneapolis in the early 1980s. They were better known for their disastrous drunken stage performances than anything else. But in 1984, they released this complete U-turn.
Let It Be is, in a word, schizophrenic. It’s punk, then pop, then “classic” rock, then I-guess-you’d-call-it-country, then blues piano.
It's very much unlike
The Lonesome Jubilee, which always knows where it’s going. This is a record with attention deficit disorder. It’s tight but messy; it has hooks and melody but it has noise; even its beauty has “rings around” its eyes. Tempos speed up, then slow down; instruments change mid-song. “We’re Comin’ Out”, for example, starts as thrash punk, then slows down to a lone piano and finger snaps, then speeds up again before devolving into cacophony.
But I love all the contradictions, conflicts and mix-ups here — they work because the record itself is about the contradictions, conflicts and mix-ups inherent in growing up. And The Replacements themselves were growing up.
All along,
Let It Be maintains a sense of humo(u)r and never takes itself too seriously. And yeah — you can play it super loud. Really, really loud if you want.
“I Will Dare” sets up the tone of confusion right off — “How young are you? / How old am I?”, Paul Westerberg sings (warning: he only sort of sings) as he strums along, and then the record moves from age to age, topic to topic and style to style. I’m going to bounce around too, since The Replacements do.
There’s an ahead-of-its-time, and even touching, tribute to gender non-conforming kids. Before that, there's a fairly amusing song about a tonsillectomy told from the point of view of the doctor (“Let’s get this over with / I tee off in an hour”). Right afterwards, just to fuck with things more, they cover Kiss.
They diss “that phony rock and roll” on MTV (“Seen Your Video”) on the one hand, and complain about a girlfriend’s answering machine on the other (talk about relating!). There are two radically different paeans to sexual awkwardness: one for girls (“Sixteen Blue”) and one for boys (“Gary’s Got A Boner”).
In short — this is a record that always keeps you off balance.
But in the middle, crowning and cementing it all, is “Unsatisfied”, one of my very favo(u)rite songs of all time, and as important an anthem in tribute to young adults as “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I see it as prophetic, a nod to the pro-Gen X, anti-baby boomer conflict that overwhelmed (white) American pop music seven years later when Kurt Cobain became a reluctant spokesperson for his generation.
Over the last few years, as I’ve watched my own kids become teenagers, and as I get older and my own teenage years fade hazily into the distance, this record speaks to me more and more and more. It barely missed the personal top 20 I submitted to
@BlueHammer85 a number of months ago, but now I think it’s firmly there.
This is one of the all-time classics of alt/indie, groundbreaking, rightly adored by nearly every important music critic . . . yet it didn’t get enough votes from the great unwashed to displace the fucking Grease soundtrack.
Well, as The Replacements sing on “Favorite Thing”, “I don’t give a single shit.”
Happy listening!
PS. And yes — the band members picked the album name after deciding to title it after “the next song that comes on the radio” while they were sitting in their manager’s car. That just makes me love it all the more.
