120 Minutes – when MTV meant music

When I saw this link for the MTV 120 Minutes archives yesterday (via Dave Holmes, who sometimes hosted the show), I almost squealed.  I clicked the link and two hours later I was swimming in nostalgia and a yearning for the days when MTV not only played videos, but was instrumental in my search for new music.

The 120 Minutes archives holds the playlist for nearly every episode of the show, starting in 1986 with host J.J. Jackson up to the last show in 2003 (after that it moved to MTV2 and became Subterranean). In between there were special guests, playlists that include music that was so new to us at the time. This show was the way to discover the alternative side of rock, to break away from the confines of what radio was offering.  Nick Cave, Pavement, Suede, Luna – all artists that were on the music fringe, being brought to you by what was arguably one of the most popular cable channels ever. There was a certain thrill in seeing artists who were on the outside being brought in to the MTV fold, and a bigger thrill when you saw a video for a band you never heard before but suddenly wanted to hear more of. And there were artists who were more mainstream but didn’t get a lot of radio play – Faith No More, Beck, Queens of the Stone Age, Folk Implosion. 120 Minutes was a feast of new and alternative music.

From its inception, MTV was a constant source of discovery for many of us. In the beginning there were new wave bands I never heard of and rock artists I’d heard of but never gave a listen to. I’d see a video, make a note of it and on my weekly trip to the record store stock up on records from all my recent discoveries. Then I’d share those discoveries with anyone who would listen. There were other shows as well, like Headbangers Ball, PostModern MTV and Yo! MTV Raps that helped me find new music, but none excited me like 120 Minutes.

Before MTV, I’d find my new music through magazines like Rolling Stone. There was an inherent risk in reading a Rolling Stone article hailing a new band as the saviors of music and running out to buy that band’s records. You never knew until you spent your money on that record if it was really something you were going to love. You just took their word for it (this was way before I decided to never believe the hype of a Rolling Stone “this is the most important record you will ever buy” article again).  Then MTV came along, then 120 Minutes and I could hear these bands, see the artists and know what I was getting. This was a whole new way of sharing music. New York radio (especially in the metro area) was never too big on pushing alternative bands, so this was the first time I was even hearing about some of the artists featured on 120 Minutes. Seriously: guest Iggy Pop and videos by the Sugarcubes, Cracker, Sonic Youth and Ministry? This was heaven.

In the later years of 120 minutes, the music became more mainstream and MTV at one point relegated the show to MTV2, often pre-empting it for one of the channel’s reality shows. The less you saw of 120 Minutes, the more you knew MTV was becoming less and less about the M.  There was a small alternative – in the late 90s my cable company offered a channel called MuchMusic (which was basically the Canadian MTV and later became Fuse), which offered up a once a week late night program called Loud, featuring metal and punk videos (apparently, it’s still on). Again, I was able to discover new-to-me bands (Refused, Far, Deftones) and get that small thrill of excitement when I’d tell everyone in the AOL music chat room (hey, I was new to the internet) to put on Loud and enjoy that fine Cannibal Corpse video I was watching.  Unfortunately, MuchMusic didn’t give much favor to Loud and it was often taken off in favor of some other show I refused to watch.

Thankfully at that time, the internet was fast becoming the place to spread the word about your favorite bands. Sure, it was a bit clunky in the early days – one song compressed into a .wav file could take about 30 minutes to download – but man, was it worth it when that song turned out to be something like Quicksand’s Thorn in My Side, which made me jump in my car and head to Mr. Cheapo’s record store, a scene I repeated over and over as I joined music email lists and then later discovered the joys of Napster and file sharing.

Now with music blogs, sites like last.fm and Pandora and the vast repository of the internet, sharing new music is easy. Every day I find another band to listen to, another artist to try out. It keeps me less nostalgic for the days when MTV was about the music and less angry at radio stations for catering to the masses (see Leo Galil’s Everything Killed the Radio Star).

But that’s not going to keep me from going through this entire archive and reliving the glory days of MTV, when the M actually stood for Music.