The Alternative Number Ones: The Replacements’ “I’ll Be You”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

The Hold Steady's Craig Finn told me a story once. He'd been introduced to Seymour Stein, the late music-business legend who founded Sire Records and signed Madonna, the Ramones, Talking Heads, and a whole mess of other greats. I'm paraphrasing Craig's story from memory here, but he told Stein something like "Hey, I just wanted to thank you for..." Stein cut him off: "The Replacements?" Craig: "Yeah! How'd you know?" Stein: "Fuckin' look at yourself!" (The Hold Steady, incidentally, have a few songs that made the Adult Alternative chart, but none on the chart that we're talking about in this column.)

It wasn't just the Minneapolis connection that made Craig Finn's Replacemets fandom obvious. Seymour Stein must've learned to spot a Replacements head from a mile away. Famously, the Replacements thought of themselves as failures. They probably actively courted failure; there are way too many stories of the band intentionally antagonizing audiences by being the worst, shittiest bar-band dickheads you can imagine. And it's true that the Replacements never succeeded in making a seismic chart impact. But for a certain breed of fan, the Replacements were tragic heroes of woeful-dirtbag blues and graceful gutter-scuzz poetry. For some of those fans, I think, the Replacements' failures were more romantic than other bands' successes.