The Replacements were loud, brilliant, and drunk.

I was nineteen when the Minneapolis band the Replacements were at their modest peak. In the 1980s, college radio had begun to emerge as a commercial force, as future behemoths like R.E.M., XTC, the Smiths, and the Cure found a collective niche apart from Top 40, in what would soon be called “alternative rock.”

You could write a book about the explosion of innovative music that ensued in the short period between alt-rock’s onset and its eventual subsumption by the very corporate entities it had once stood against. Nowadays, when nearly everyone you know has put out a record, it seems quaint that new music was once a scarce physical product and as such a valuable commodity. It’s hard to say collectively what set the acts of that era apart from... Read More