{"id":304900,"date":"2025-11-21T09:37:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T09:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/304900\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T09:37:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T09:37:08","slug":"the-replacements-let-it-be-is-the-greatest-album-ever-made-about-growing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/304900\/","title":{"rendered":"The Replacements\u2019 Let It Be is the greatest album ever made about growing up."},"content":{"rendered":"

The legendary pitcher Leroy \u201cSatchel\u201d Paige once remarked, \u201cDon\u2019t look back. Something might be gaining on you<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s one of the great bons mots on the subject of aging, and particularly fitting coming from a man who threw his last professional pitches at the age of 59. Much like sports, music tends to be a young person\u2019s game, and especially so since the earliest years of the rock \u2019n\u2019 roll era, when artists like Chuck Berry<\/a>, the Coasters<\/a>, and Eddie Cochran<\/a> found pay dirt by mining a hitherto underexplored topic in American song: teenage angst. In the mid-1950s, the idea that the cutting edge of pop would come to be dominated by relatively young people writing songs for and about people even younger was a revolutionary notion, one that in the next decade would come to be taken for granted. \u201cI hope I die before I get old,\u201d the Who\u2019s Roger Daltrey sang back in 1965, coining a slogan for a genre\u2014though, 60 years and many millions of dollars later, he\u2019s likely glad his wish failed to come true. Even as septuagenarians and octogenarians like Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, respectively, continue to tour to ever-more-astounding box-office receipts, they\u2019re doing so largely on the back of music they made 40, 50, even 60 years ago. Rock has always had a lot more to say about being (and staying) young than it ever has about growing old.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no small achievement, then, that the Replacements\u2019 1984 masterpiece Let It Be might be the greatest rock \u2019n\u2019 roll album ever made about growing up, if not exactly getting old. (Three of the band\u2019s four members\u2014rhythm guitarist and singer-songwriter Paul Westerberg, lead guitarist Bob Stinson, and drummer Chris Mars\u2014were still in their early 20s when they began recording it; the fourth, bassist Tommy Stinson, was only 16.) Let It Be, which receives a lovely, deluxe-edition reissue from Rhino this week, was the band\u2019s fourth official release, after 1981\u2019s Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, the 1982 EP Stink, and 1983\u2019s Hootenanny. But it\u2019s where the legend of one of rock\u2019s most star-crossed bands takes root, an album that drew rapturous critical acclaim\u2014a four-star review from Rolling Stone and a fourth-place showing in the Village Voice\u2019s Pazz & Jop year-end critics\u2019 poll, above such era-defining blockbusters as Van Halen\u2019s 1984 and Cyndi Lauper\u2019s She\u2019s So Unusual\u2014while failing to even sniff the Billboard Top 200.<\/p>\n

\n It is one of popular music\u2019s most breathtaking quantum leaps\u00a0forward.\n<\/p>\n

The new edition of Let It Be includes a remastered version of the original album, a sizable helping of previously unreleased demos and alternate takes, and a previously bootlegged 28-song live performance from Chicago in March 1984. There\u2019s nothing here that\u2019s quite as revelatory as the brand-new mix of 1985\u2019s Tim<\/a> that accompanied that album\u2019s deluxe reissue back in 2023, but that\u2019s OK. The live set is spirited and thrilling, even if the recording quality leaves something to be desired; the alternate takes and outtakes are interesting marginalia, although I doubt that anyone who\u2019s ever heard Let It Be has spent much time wondering whether the best takes from those sessions made it onto the album. The set also includes an expansive essay by the wonderful critic and musician Elizabeth Nelson, and another, shorter missive from Peter Jesperson, the band\u2019s former manager and co-producer, and the co-founder of Twin\/Tone Records, the famed Minneapolis indie label that first released Let It Be 41 years ago.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

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Over the years, many fans and critics have pointed to the previous year\u2019s Hootenanny as a crucial predecessor to Let It Be, in terms of the Replacements starting to take themselves and their audience a bit more seriously than they had on their earlier, furiously impetuous hardcore and hardcore-adjacent releases. There\u2019s certainly something to this: Hootenanny highlights like \u201cColor Me Impressed\u201d and \u201cWithin Your Reach\u201d found the boys ascending to new levels of focus and control, both musically and lyrically.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Greg Helgeson<\/p>\n

But this assessment also tends to overly benefit from hindsight. The truth is that there\u2019s relatively little on Hootenanny, or anywhere else in the band\u2019s prior oeuvre, that suggests that Westerberg and his \u2019Mats<\/a> mates had a work like Let It Be in them. It is one of popular music\u2019s most breathtaking quantum leaps forward. Let It Be is an album about life and art becoming realer, more meaningful but also more complicated, and the strange feelings this evolution provokes. In his notes for the box set, Jesperson recalls Westerberg shuttling demo tapes of incredible song after incredible song to his manager and mentor in the dead of night, demanding that Jesperson hold them because Westerberg was worried that if he kept them in his own house, he\u2019d have second thoughts and erase them\u2014the seriousness and sincerity of what he was writing was genuinely freaking him out.<\/p>\n

Let It Be\u2019s most famous track may be its opener, \u201cI Will Dare<\/a>,\u201d which also served as the album\u2019s only single. \u201cHow young are you? How old am I?\/ Let\u2019s count the rings around my eyes,\u201d sings Westerberg; this killer opening line also serves as a sort of mission statement for everything to come. The ambivalence and insecurity that haunt that nether region between adolescence and adulthood are the defining theme of Let It Be, explored most often through the lens of relationships. \u201cEverything you dream of is right in front of you\/ And everything is a lie,\u201d sings Westerberg on \u201cUnsatisfied<\/a>.\u201d \u201cSixteen Blue<\/a>,\u201d a spiritual inheritor of Big Star\u2019s classic \u201cThirteen<\/a>,\u201d finds Westerberg imparting rueful wisdom to an unnamed teenage subject: \u201cYour age is the hardest age\/ Everything just drags and drags,\u201d he rasps on the song\u2019s refrain, a perfect crystallization of how teenaged-ness is not just fleeting but, paradoxically, interminable. The album\u2019s closer, \u201cAnswering Machine<\/a>,\u201d might be the finest song ever written about a quintessentially postadolescent pastime: the lovelorn drunk dial.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s \u201cAndrogynous<\/a>,\u201d Westerberg\u2019s ode to gender fluidity, which was the most astonishing recording the \u2019Mats had made to date. Its austere arrangement of little more than a vocal and a slyly propulsive piano can\u2019t help but recall another stunner by a fellow Minnesotan, Prince\u2019s \u201cHow Come U Don\u2019t Call Me Anymore?<\/a>,\u201d released as the B-side to \u201c1999\u201d just two years earlier. \u201cAndrogynous\u201d is an entirely beautiful song, both righteous and elusive, full of piercing insight and lump-in-your-throat imagery that\u2019s wry and aphoristic enough to be about anyone and everyone. As Nelson writes, the song\u2019s power \u201cis less about doctrinaire proclamations and more about the way it renders and romanticizes the outsider.\u201d It\u2019s one of the great works of unadorned humanism in the rock canon.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

None of which is to say that Let It Be lacks humor\u2014far from it. Look no further than its title<\/a>, a joke that\u2019s as funny today as it was 41 years ago. \u201cTommy Gets His Tonsils Out<\/a>\u201d is the greatest punk song ever written about ENT doctors; \u201cGary\u2019s Got a Boner<\/a>\u201d is basically a premeditated thumb-in-the-eye to every critic who\u2019d go on to praise the band\u2019s newfound maturity. One of my favorite tracks on the album is \u201cSeen Your Video<\/a>,\u201d the first three-quarters of which is a wordless and unexpectedly gorgeous instrumental before the song reveals itself as a diatribe against MTV and all the bands who embraced it (\u201cSeen your video\/ Your phony rock \u2019n\u2019 roll\/ We don\u2019t want to know\u201d), a hobbyhorse the \u2019Mats would continue to flog in hysterical fashion on their next album as well<\/a>. (In keeping with the anxiety-of-adulthood theme, Jesperson notes that the song was originally titled \u201cAdult\u201d\u2014\u201cYou look like an adult\/ You act like an adult\/ Who taught you that?\u201d)<\/p>\n

If Let It Be is the sound of a rock band dragging itself kicking and screaming into maturity, then from today\u2019s vantage point, the LP\u2019s broader historical context makes this quality resonate in unexpected ways. In the 21st century, much ink has been spilled over rock\u2019s gradual decline, at least in terms of its onetime centrality to the popular-music firmament. 1984 was one of those great hinge years<\/a> in popular-music history, like 1967 or 1977 before it. Rock, widely understood since the late 1960s<\/a> as music made mostly by white men, was still a massive cultural force\u2014Born in the U.S.A. came out that year, after all\u2014but you didn\u2019t have to squint to see some cracks in the genre\u2019s monolith. 1984 was the year Whitney Houston debuted and Madonna released \u201cLike a Virgin,\u201d while Michael Jackson\u2019s record-breaking Thriller and Prince\u2019s Purple Rain soundtrack dominated the Billboard album charts, holding the No.\u00a01 spot for a jaw-dropping 37 weeks between them. And of course a burgeoning musical form was continuing to ascend out of New York City: In 1984, Run-D.M.C. released its self-titled debut, to critical acclaim and surprisingly robust sales; a 16-year-old who called himself LL Cool J released his first single; and T La Rock & Jazzy Jay\u2019s \u201cIt\u2019s Yours\u201d became the inaugural release of a small label called Def Jam. Forty-plus years after its release, Let It Be still sounds like a great rock album, and one that seems to intuit that something might be gaining on it.<\/p>\n

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