Yo La Tengo are looking back – tomorrow's grim and just around the corner, and sedition flavors coffee drinks in certain cafés and bookstores. Self-taught social scientists are considering class war – or considering the moment when they might consider it, anyway – and refusing to admit the damage irony has done to their lives. But unlike some folks, they do not need a damn you-know-who to tell them which way the wind is blowing, and soon – who knows? – they'll cast their lot with the dispossessed, sing both sides of Les Mis, and tackle "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," thereby calling it a revolution.

On March 22 – the day Prisoners of Love debuted – a near mob of middle-aged, crazy Gen X-ers showed up at Amoeba Music's SoCal H.Q. on Sunset Boulevard, jonesing for retail action. The three-CD set is a fab compilation, boasting 26 songs – including "Sugarcube," "Barnaby Hardly Working," "Tom Courtenay," and "Autumn Sweater" – and a limited-edition disc of outtakes. Yo La Tengo have mined their fertile 20-year career, staking a legitimate claim to the title of coolest band to live in Hoboken, N.J., (give or take the Feelies) before everyone knew about the place. The result is a document of growth, imagination, and genius, a combination that attracted 20-year-old New York University sophomores who had barely started writing their first novels in 1985 when YLT began to play out. Some are still sophomores! Some wear blue collars by fate rather than by choice; others have taken a well-traveled, prosperous road. They had choices to make, and so they made them.

Don't blame Yo La Tengo, a band that never let anyone down. Witness this collection of amazing music. YLT offered quirky freedom to a smart, insular army battling psychic incarceration, and Prisoners of Love is proof that given the choice between pain and a portfolio, only pain will do. Remember that first divorce, or a few chaotic pages once called – proudly – chapters? Did you use that time well – the 20 years during which Yo La Tengo made life better than it would have otherwise been? Have you accepted the certainty that soon Ira Kaplan's amazing band will anchor classic rock satellite radio like Spooky Tooth or the Youngbloods do on some traditional airwaves?

Then you understand – as your hyper-aggro, rich ex-roommates; aimless, paralyzed grad students; middle-school parents; bad writers; frustrated cabbies; waiters; welders; gamblers; losers; lovers; and sad men and women about to turn 40 all across the country will tell you – that this is what love is all about. And that's why, at the end of the day, all a person can do is turn up the music and watch yesterday recede like a hairline into a storage closet crammed with fat, sweating baby boomers, cartoon cutouts of b-boys, and everyone who forgot to remember to turn off the dreams before discovering they weren't meant to come true. (J.H. Tompkins)