Forever Young, Drunk and Stupid

Pitchfork's Mark Richardson offers some elegant perspective on The Replacements:

Being a fuck-up with a good heart is endearing when you're young; if you've not changed by the time you hit your late twenties, well, you're probably just pretty much a fuck-up, and eventually, you become annoying. All the contradictions in the Replacements' music, and in Westerberg's songwriting, are not something you can easily carry into adulthood, which is partly why the band would run into some trouble later on. But none of that matters here, when they were young and understood so much about youth. People change, but records don't, and that's part of what makes them great. They're frozen in place, ready to be found by people who need them.