Paul Westerberg’s comical hatred of music videos: “The whole idea sickens me”
It could have been a match made in heaven. In August 1981, just days after the launch of a new music-dedicated television network known as MTV, an exciting new rock band called The Replacements released their debut album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash. If rock ‘n’ roll was reaching its inevitable evolution into a visual art form, there was every reason to think that a budding talent like The Replacements frontman, Paul Westerberg, could become the voice and face of that next generation.
Of course, this never came to pass, not because the Replacements didn’t live up to their potential over the course of the 1980s, but as a consequence of the band’s willful rejection of everything MTV represented to them, i.e., show biz, corporate influence, and style over substance. From early on, Westerberg didn’t keep his opinions close to the vest either. When a reporter for LA Weekly asked him if he “liked music videos” in a 1984 interview, the answer was swift and to the point.
“Nahhhhh, I think they’re ridiculous,” Westerberg said scornfully. “It’s got nothing to do with rock ‘n’ roll. It cheapens it. It makes it phoney, safe. Bands that do it, obviously, they’re doing it for the money. But no one can touch rock ‘n’ roll. They can’t tell you what to do, and this is softening that line, making it easier for the businessmen to get their hooks into you. The whole idea sickens me.”
By this point, the 24-year-old Westerberg had already addressed the same topic in the form of a fiery song called ‘Seen Your Video’ on The Replacements’ fourth album, 1984’s Let It Be. His vocals on that track, which doesn’t even arrive until two and a half minutes into a three-minute song, include a few short lines delivered – like a hoarse-voiced Holden Caulfield – as a stern rebuke of his ‘80s rock contemporaries. “Seen your video / The phoney rock ‘n’ roll / We don’t want to know”.
A year later, when the band’s new label, Sire, made them put out a promotional video for the single ‘Bastards of Young’ from the album Tim, the band famously responded by making one of the great anti-video videos of all-time, featuring a black-and-white continuous shot of a person listening to the record through the speakers in their living room.
“I guess in the Midwest – since you’re sheltered from the Coast – if you don’t get success right away, you sort of tend to hang on to the real,” Westerberg told LA Weekly in ‘84, citing The Replacements’ Minnesota origins as a possible reason for their untrendy instincts. “Just the love for the music and the realisation that there’s really nothing else you can do. There’s less glamour, obviously, in the Midwest, and I think that’s true to the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not show biz.”
“We’re uneducated, we’re not business-minded, and we’re everything you’re not supposed to be to make it in music,” he added, before saying, “…I guess we’re trying to prove that if you keep the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s enough to keep your head above water.”
Ironically, over time, The Replacements’ un-glamorous “realness” really did become one of their most commercially viable selling points, as fans bored of the sanitised state of video rock found a new champion in Westerberg and co. The band’s total disinterest in self-promotion and opposition to “selling out” also set the blueprint for the “alternative” bands of the 1990s, though very few of them spurned MTV with quite the same gusto.
