Rock don't give a shit, you know

Punk rock was never meant to grow old. For their first three studio efforts, The Replacements epitomized the punk ethos. Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981), the EP Stink (1982), and Hootenanny (1983) are loud, bashy fun.

- BY ROBERT BAIRD

Song titles on Stink give a fair idea of the band's level of maturity in those days: "Fuck School"; "White and Lazy"; and "Dope Smokin' Moron." It has been suggested over the years that this most worshipped and mythologized of all '80s indie rock bands weren't just deliberately sloppy but suffered from self-sabotage. Around 1984, the band discovered that punk, even more than most other forms of popular music, had its own credo of unwritten rules, and those rules started to chafe against the band's nonconformist ways.

In 1984, during the recording of the Twin/Tone album that would become Let It Be, the ragged, out-for-a-laugh Minnesota quartet of brothers Bob and Tommy Stinson (guitar and bass, respectively), Chris Mars (drums), and Paul Westerberg (vocals, rhythm guitar) began to find their way. Their then-emerging leader, Westerberg, told Rolling Stone in 2009, "This was the first time I had songs that we arranged, rather than just banging out riffs and giving them titles." The last member to join the band, Westerberg had asserted himself both in songwriting and in envisioning future possibilities. Either the villain or the hero of the saga of the 'Mats raucous tale—sometimes both—he had written a group of songs that seemed to have potential for wider success, and he was ready to make a more significant album. Unable to resist sneering at a few sacred cows along the way, however—not to mention invoking a typically ballsy comparison—they named the collection