Let’s Take a Ride Through the Replacements’ Minneapolis

Plus a local "Voice" contender, a music school's sad fate, and lotsa local show listings.

12:08 PM CDT on October 8, 2021

All day, all night, all music television with the Replacements.

|YouTube

Seen their video?

Sorry to be all HEY!!! REMEMBER THE REPLACEMENTS, MINNEAPOLIS??? on a Friday morning, but it’s not often we get a new video for a song recorded 40 years ago by a band that broke up 30 years ago. “Takin’ a Ride” is a visual cheat sheet for the Mats’ Minneapolis, as Jon Clifford of HiFi Hair & Records chauffeurs his pup Fred through the city in his '63 Pontiac Catalina convertible passing landmarks (many long gone) from the group’s heyday, like the Let It Be house and Peter Jesperson’s apartment building. There are also cameos from Kevin Cole, Steve McClellan, Mary Lucia, and Anita and Lonnie Stinson (Bob and Tommy’s mom and sister). Directed by Eric Kassel, the vid serves as a promo for the expanded four-CD (and one-LP!) Rhino reissue of the band’s debut, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, which arrives two Fridays from now. (That’s October 22.) And after all, the Replacements were alway big fans of the music video as an art form.

Minneapolis singer Libianca has got The Voice

If you’re a regular viewer of the televised singing game show The Voice—and who isn’t? (I’m not)—you don’t need me (a person who, as we’ve established, does not regularly watch the show) to tell you about 20-year-old Minneapolis singer Libianca. But if you don't know her, the locally sourced contestant impressed the show’s celebrity panel this week with her version of SZA’s “Good Days”—despite Ariana Grande’s enthusiasm, Libianca picked Blake Shelton as her Voice coach. On Shelton’s latest album, Body Language, he sings the lyric “I thought your sex was the best that I'd ever known/But now I don't” and a song called “Corn” that is about corn.

Newly opened north Minneapolis music school closes

Well, that’s a shame, to put it mildly. After just one month, the Minneapolis School of New Music, a tuition-free north Minneapolis charter middle school with a music-immersive curriculum, has shut down, apparently due to pandemic-related staffing shortages. “We simply do not have the staff to continue our academic program,” said school founder Bart Johnson on the school’s website.

Ladies and gentlemen… a great new Twitter account

OK so this isn’t “local” at all (unless you count Harry Dean Stanton introducing the Replacements, and I’ve already mentioned them once today, so that’d be cheating) but I love “SNL Hosts Introducing the Musical Guest” (@snlhostsintro), this newish Twitter account that, yes, shares clips of Saturday Night Live hosts introducing the musical guests. (And I should say, as American institutions go, I value SNL about as highly as the Electoral College.) What’s fun about it is that no one knows exactly how this introduction should be made, so you get the grandest theatrical flourishes and the oddest straightforward understatements. How did the FCC allow George Foreman to say “Hole” like that? Who even is the pretty lady who introduces Missy Elliott and why does the way she says “and Magoo” make me want to marry her? When were Swans on SNL? Huh? Oh… Zwan, lol. OK, here’s the Replacements intro.