For a band best known for their pubescent humor and alcohol-drowned performances (which occasionally were just meltdowns), The Replacements left quite the mark on alternative rock, gathering citations as one of the forefathers of the now uselessly broad genre of indie rock. The first chapter (and my personal favorite) in a trilogy of impeccable 80s toned rock albums embodies this ethic best: album art shows the band in their high-top Converse sitting on the roof of any stereotypical suburban rooftop. The album‰’s title, Let It Be, was chosen precisely to illustrate the band‰’s disregard for rock‰’s sacred cows. What fatter cow to slaughter than the Beatles?
In the midst this smorgasbord of teenage angst, the band‰’s confessional lyrics and emotional honesty manage to still strike a heartstring decades later. This is perhaps embodied best in “Answering Machine,‰” a song that manages to capture communication frustrations and package them in a song that has defied aging while constantly becoming more relatable to new audiences.
The song begins with the recognizably over-reverberated, glam tined guitar work featured on the album‰’s first half hour. The instrument takes the spotlight near exclusively with Paul Westerberg‰’s pitch-perfect (in an emotional, not technical way) vocal performance. Initially, the guitar sounds corny and canned in a way that hair/glam/whatever metal has claimed all its own, but it soon breaks from the chugging, palm muted chords into dancing, sparkling arpeggiation. Westerberg lets us know from the start what this song is about: “How do you say you‰’re OK to an answering machine? How do you say goodnight to an answering machine?‰” His timbre turns to a helplessly frustrated yell at the song‰’s close with “I hate your answering machine,‰” repeated over and over until a sound byte takes over and the answering machine guides us through the album and song‰’s final minute. The singer‰’s been robbed of his human ability to convey genuine feeling to a human subject, replaced by an automated, robotic middleman.

The human element‰’s lost somewhere in translation, but we don‰’t consciously notice it. Inflection, tone, gestures, gaze, and facial expressions are reduced to mere words. The song has found immorality, but only through our own descent into technology. Human interaction moves into a screen that we stare into neurotically, infinitely available and desperately lonely. It almost makes the answering machine look like an intimate form of communication.