Has any city (or in this case two cities) had a year like Minneapolis had in 1984?
Sport is easier to quantify than music. Concrete statistics can tell you definitively who performed at the highest level in athletic competition. But music is not so easily defined. Something can be hugely popular but not stand the test of time. Something can be the biggest seller in the land and also be timeless. Often popularity and artistic merit do not go hand in hand, but since it is all subjective, who is to say what is great and what is not?
I am here today to retroactively award a rare Triple Crown to Minneapolis/St. Paul (The Twin Cities) for the year 1984. It’s the 40th anniversary of the ultimate triumvirate…
Triple Crown, Part One: Prince, “Purple Rain”
Firstly, and most world changingly, Prince dropped
Purple Rain on June 25, 1984. “When Doves Cry” was released in May and the album took off like a rocket. Prince had primed the pump for this massive leap with a string of daring, tuneful, shocking and subversive albums.
But “Purple Rain” was a different animal altogether. The movie came out a month after the release of the album and by fall of 1984, Prince was the most famous person on the planet. No one will EVER be as huge as Prince was that fall. Ever.
I won’t even waste your time making you listen to me rave. All you need to know is that it happened, it was earth-shattering, and one man made it happen.
And where did that meteor of a superstar live, breathe and create? Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Triple Crown, Part Two: Husker Du, “Zen Arcade”
Husker Du, much like Prince, had been carving out their very idiosyncratic niche since the beginning of the decade. Playing louder, harder, faster and more intently than any of their contemporaries, Husker Du broke all the rules of “hardcore”.
It’s mostly been swept under the rug, but early American punk music scenes were hardly the Left Wing empathy fests that people seem to retroactively misremember. The speed and intensity of the music drew violent, angry, close-minded crowds. Homosexuality was not celebrated. Skinheads came out looking for fights.
Zen Arcade was released on July 3, 1984. A double album with extended jams, psychedelica and guitar solos, it was everything the punk underground supposedly rejected. But it landed like a hand grenade in a foxhole.
Their record label (the notoriously corrupt and litigious SST) was taken by surprise when it became as popular as it was. You couldn’t get it. Local record stores wrote down orders in pencil and reached out to SST in vain.
And then there was the music itself. It still sounds like it is happening live in front of your face. Angry, melodic, sprawling, howling, vengeful, spiteful, agonized spiritual distress.
Like every other aspect of underground music at the time, the sexuality of the group’s songwriting duo was a widely known but still covered up secret. I know many men and women from that scene who felt a sense of kinship and community, who were liberated from the constraints of a very conservative popular culture.
The impact this double album had on underground music was seismic. All of a sudden you could write a fifteen minute instrumental with guitar feedback looped backwards and just plop it right next to a shimmering acoustic folk song.
Rules? Ha, we spit on your rules. The sound of Husker Du can be heard in scores of early ‘90’s “indie” bands. Hell, the very word “indie” came about in part due to the Huskers and their fiery approach to the music business. Emo, nu-metal, indie, you ask the purveyors of those genres what they were listening to in their formative years and “Zen Arcade” is bound to be on the tip of their tongue.
Triple Crown, Part Three: The Replacements, “Let It Be”
My bias is well known. Not only are The Replacements my favorite band, but I believe them to be the greatest American rock and roll band of all time. Including their triumphant comeback tour and subsequent re-releases, their career spans almost five decades.
They released their masterpiece Let It Be on October 2, 1984.
Putting the music itself aside, the iconic cover photo alone probably inspired the formation of thousands of bands, all clamoring to follow in the footsteps of these genius lunatics.
You know the age-old debate, Beatles vs. Stones? Well, The Replacements are the American equivalent of both at the same time. Raucous, rebellious, melodic, ridiculous, sexy, pathetic, hateful, empathetic, infuriating, hilarious, tragic, low-brow, hi-octane, explosive, implosive…throw a dart at a thesaurus and whatever you hit they will encompass.
They were also one of the only underground punk bands I ever saw who had as many female fans as they did male. Make no mistake, Paul Westerberg was a post-teen idol, Tommy Stinson was ogled as a fifteen year old by throngs of twenty-somethings and their pin-up qualities were a massive part of their appeal. The rest of the punk world was barely sexual at all.
“Let It Be” captures them in all their glory. Yearning pain nestles next to a Kiss cover, snotty masturbation jokes keep company with overt declarations of unrequited love, and thunderous rock and roll anthems drop off into piano shuffles. Each song sounds like a different band but the whole thing is unmistakably The Replacements.
To sum up, over the course of just three months, three wildly different artists released three massively influential albums that altered the landscape of American popular music. And they all lived within twenty miles of one another.
Insane.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1984. The Twin Cities Triple Crown. Prince. Husker Du. The Replacements.
