Let It Be

The Replacements

album cover

Urgent Unkempt Grandeur

In the wise-beyond-his-years songs that twenty-four-year-old Paul Westerberg wrote for the third full-length Replacements album, there are raging hormones ("Gary's Got a Boner"), desperate Junior Casanova moves ("Sixteen Blue"), and frame-by-frame accounts of various rejections and embarrassments endured by awkward teenagers. A jaded romantic who once described himself as a "rebel without a clue," Westerberg dwells on those uncomfortable moments, chronicling the torments of growing up in agonizing, heart-ripped-open detail. His sharp, sardonic songs are a kind of American treasure—a knowing look back at the first-beer inebriated lunges and the all-consuming longings of restless kids desperate for companionship, aching to be anywhere that might be better than here.

Westerberg's renderings of conflicted teenage feelings set the Replacements apart from every other scruffy rock band affiliated with the lo-fi postpunk explosion of the early 1980s. And by the time of this album, the Minneapolis band, originally called Dogbreath, seemed destined to break through into the rock mainstream. Let It Be should have done the trick—its songs range from abject dejection to blindingly upbeat giddiness to fist-in-the-air anthem stuff, and each balances catchy bubblegum hooks against gonzo rock delirium in a slightly different way. Sometimes Westerberg and his crew come right out and hit you over the head ("I Will Dare"), and sometimes they're surreptitious, as on "unsatisfied," a sullen ode that gives voice to a vague generational restlessness felt by many in the Replacements' audience.

Let It Be was heavily salivated over by critics when it appeared. Since then, it has turned up regularly on lists of the Best Rock Albums Ever. But it never connected with a mass audience—some have suggested that the band's caterwauling, frequently inebriated and seriously erratic live performances didn't help win over doubters. That's a shame, because though it's always a hairpin turn from totally spinning out, this album, unlike much postpunk, has bracing and poignant growing-up stories to tell.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1984, Twin/Tone
Key Tracks: "Sixteen Blue," "Androgynous," "Favorite Thing"
Catalog Choice: Tim; Don't Tell a Soul; Pleased to Meet Me
Next Stop: Meat Puppets: Meat Puppets II
After That: Bob Mould: Workbook
Book Pages: 643–644