The Replacements: Let It Be (Deluxe Version) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"Label wants a hit/and we don't give a shit!" Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg once sang. Yet the real miracle of his legendarily self-destructive band is that it created masterful pop in spite of itself. Success wrested heroically from seemingly inescapable failure: that was the Replacements' magic, as the recent reissue of their first four releases reaffirms. It still seems impossible that the most indelible of the four, 1984's Let It Be, came from these booze-crazed gutter punks. Along with a few bonus outtakes (including a wrenching alternate version of the sexual-confusion confession "Sixteen Blue") and covers (a tremblingly majestic take on the Grass Roots' "Temptation Eyes"), this reissue captures the perfectly turned punk-pop bravado ("I Will Dare," "We're Comin' Out"), the bleeding-heart letters-in-a-bottle ("Unsatisfied," "Answering Machine") and the proud junk food ("Gary's Got a Boner," Kiss' "Black Diamond"). As critic Gina Arnold says in her liner notes, the set summed up the underdog worldview of fans who saw the band as their personal cracked mirror. The band would subsequently sign to a major and make another top-shelf record (1985's Tim), its last with guitarist and wild card Bob Stinson. But the loser's heroism of Let It Be was — for the group and for its fans — the end of an era.