So “Who’s Hot?”

If you believe the image of Michael J. Fox standing behind a crystal ball on the cover of Rolling Stone, the Replacements are one of “The New Stars In Your Future”—and that almost makes ’em legitimate and respectable. But Rolling Stone was hardly the first to sing the praises of the Replacements. There's been a big critical buzz ever since the band cut their first hardcore-meets-rootsrock records for (their hometown) Min-

neapolis’s Twip/Tone label five years ago. Critics placed the band at the forefront of their “American Rock Renaissance” hype, and voted two of the band’s LPs number four and number two respectively in the 1984 and ’85 Village Voice national rock critics’ poll. The Voice thought so much of the Replacements that it put the band’s picture on its cover and had RJ Smith write a major feature on them before they even signed with Warner Brothers.