Friday Morning Video-watching: We've Already Wasted A Lot More Than 120 Minutes On This Site

friday morning video-watching

We've Already Wasted A Lot More Than 120 Minutes On This Site

Like most music nerds in their late twenties, MTV's 120 Minutes was a staple of my adolescence, and a prime influence on my taste in indie and alternative rock. Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, anyone can troll around for almost any video that would have ever aired on the program, but the anonymous curator of 120minutes.tumblr.com improves on that by posting five embedded alt-rock classics per page, roughly approximating the experience of watching the show by adding a sense of continuity and an element of surprise.

Flipping through the site's back pages offers no shortage of geeky thrills — Oh my gosh, it's Velocity Girl! Wow, I didn't even know there was a video for that Ned's Atomic Dustbin song! WTF, how did Ween ever get so much money to produce that mini-movie for "Freedom Of 76"? — but the apex thus far is most certainly this page, which has clips from the Stone Roses, Cracker, Frank Black, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Sonic Youth.

120 Minutes [120minutes.tumblr.com]

11:05 AM on Fri Jul 27 2007
By Matthew Perpetua
660 views
9 comments

Comments

by Camp Tiger Claw at 11:56 AM on 07/27/07
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All the goodness of 120 Minutes without falling asleep in homeroom the next morning. Awesome.
by Audif Jackson Winters III at 12:05 PM on 07/27/07
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I remember the 120 Minutes web site posting like 10 second clips of stuff it played, and that serving as the only thing I could see from the video if I missed an episode. Consequently I remember watching a certain 10 seconds of the video for "A Design For Life" over and over again.
by Dead Air ummm Dead Air at 12:10 PM on 07/27/07
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No Matt Pinfield!?!?!

WHACK!
by pjohn at 12:13 PM on 07/27/07
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wow.
this is kinda the greatest site ever.
i forgot what a good song "divine hammer" is.
by SonnyHooper at 12:19 PM on 07/27/07
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Anyone else hate the fact that VH1 Classic's Sunday evening programming got worse when it switched from The Alternative to 120 Minutes? For a brief moment I had hope they were just going to show old episodes. A Dave Kendall sighting at the end of each weekend? oh well.
by katieee at 01:01 PM on 07/27/07
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@SonnyHooper: Yes! I still get sucked in sometimes, but mostly the videos are abysmal. They really need to take a breather on Love and Rockets.
by chrisb at 02:33 PM on 07/27/07
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Late twenties? Yeesh, I wish!

But hooray for Ned's Atomic Dustbin!
by hypnotyza at 04:57 PM on 07/27/07
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holy motherload of great vids!!!

i haven't seen some of these since the Kevin Seal / Lewis Largent days...
by anrcox at 06:39 PM on 07/27/07
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ChrisB-

Ditto. 20 something? Try mid-Thirties and a heaping helping of the weekday PostModern MTV.

Thusly did my love for Love and Rockets, Smiths, Siouxsie, SugarCubes, Depeche Mode, et. al. find soil and a chance to bloom.