Tag Archives: 120 minutes

The choice of the last generation

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So there have been a few things (memes, engagement bait, the usual) going around on Threads about GenX and music lately that got me thinking. One in particular commented on how my generation was one of the last to really immerse ourselves in our favorite music to an obsessive degree, and how the extreme prevalence of social media kind of took away the ability to slow down and connect with our favorite things for more than a few minutes at a time.

I suppose I agree to this to some level, given that the internets have dulled my sense of glomming onto an amazing album that I listen to over and over, something I would frequently do with gusto in the 80s and 90s and maybe into the early 00s. While I don’t think social media was the sole direct reason for this, I could conceivably say that it did rewire my brain a bit to cause it indirectly. Over the last several years, I became more obsessed with the tsundoku of collecting new releases and full discographies, given how easy it is to do so these days in digital format. And in the process, I forgot to latch onto those few albums that truly change me, whether personally, emotionally or creatively. [This is something I’ve been working to correct over the last several months.]

Those Threads posts did, however, get me thinking about those years in the late 80s when my music obsessions first started peaking. And in the spirit of the “we’re the last generation to experience this” theme, I started thinking: In a way I get this, especially when I think about 120 Minutes. When I was in high school, specifically my junior and senior years, the number of kids I knew who loved music as much as I do, let alone what kind of music I listened to, I could probably count on two hands.

I wasn’t just a weirdo nerd who obsessed over dorky things like radio and records, I was also one of the VERY few kids who wore those Cure and Smiths tee-shirts to school. That was why those two years were so formative and memorable: that brief stretch from late 1986 to late 1988 were the only moments in time in my youth when I’d been able to surround myself with people of similar mindsets and musical tastes. Again, this was well before social media where I can now easily find and follow a music nerd of equal obsessiveness in about ten seconds.

Watching 120 Minutes, then, was that little bit of extra excitement and hope for me. It wasn’t just about listening to this different style of music, this ‘college rock’ or ‘modern rock’ as it may have been called, that I loved so much. I was also about connecting with an alternative lifestyle that I knew existed somewhere outside of my tiny life in the small town I lived in. For those brief two years this was something I could share with a dozen or so other kids, and they understood just as I did how fleeting this kind of thing was, back before social media permanently and constantly connected us all together. I couldn’t help but feel that bit of lingering hope that somewhere out there, well beyond the unending forests of small town central New England, were more kids like myself.

In a way, it’s like tsundoku in a social setting: knowing there are others out there, just waiting to be met, even if we never do. And that was just enough to make me feel a little less alone.

As for the title I used above, the choice of the last generation: this was a tagline at the end of one of the ten-second buffers for the show. It’s a very GenX phrase at that: one, it riffs ironically on Pepsi’s then popular culture-grab tag (“the choice of a new generation”), but also on the back end of the Cold War, when we still weren’t sure if the Soviets were going to bomb us into oblivion. Added to the fact that the visuals for the buffer were pulled from two music videos with dire themes: Laibach’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” (torch-bearing soldiers marching slo-mo through semi-darkness towards a village bonfire) and Killing Joke’s “A New Day” (the slow rise of the morning sun behind a ragged and bare mountain), that tagline fading in at the final moment like a stark reminder of our potential mortality at the hands of others. Heady stuff to see at 1am on a Sunday night when you’re overtired and not looking forward to another week of dealing with jocks at school and grim news in real life.

But at the same time, as a GenXer, we embraced that grim reminder because we dared to. Because there was that slim chance that it would all get better. Because it was easier to embrace the darkness than to curse the one candle that someone else inevitably controlled. Because darkness was where the more interesting, the more creative, the more alternative things hide. We knew there were alternatives out there, beyond what was being fed to us.

Sometimes I think about that, and sometimes I remind myself that this was how GenX survived the jocks and the bulllies, how they survived the Reagan and Thatcher years, how they survived the Cold War, and how they taught themselves to see life in different ways.

And these days, sometimes I hope that newer generations learn how to do this as well.

Favorite Songs: Crowded House, “Don’t Dream It’s Over”

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Interestingly, whenever I think of the 80s golden era of MTV’s 120 Minutes, I think of this song. It was one of the first videos I remember seeing when I started taping it on Sunday nights so I could watch it after school on Monday. It’s one of the first alternative rock songs I can think of that got more than light rotation on the channel outside of that show. If I recall, this video wasn’t actually on the first episode I’d taped but the last video just before the show started. Somehow it just hit me the right way just then and I was hooked. I remember picking up the single at the local department store on the edge of town one rainy afternoon just before I had to get myself fitted for a suit for some formal thing I’ve since forgotten.

I’d been a Split Enz fan earlier, of course. I owned their 1982 album Time and Tide (the one with “Dirty Creature”, “Never Ceases to Amaze Me” and “Six Months in a Leaky Boat”, all of which got play in the early days of the channel). So when the younger Finn brother Neil chose to go it alone after their 1984 split, I was curious. Would they be as quirky and catchy, or would they go in a different direction? By 1986, it would seem he’d take the latter route, taking his songwriting much more seriously, his style becoming more Beatles-inspired. [He’d eventually come full circle with 2024’s CH album Gravity Stairs, which has a very Revolver influence to it, especially its album cover.] This track would be a surprise worldwide hit, even here in the States where it made it all the way to the Billboard’s top ten.

I think the other thing that appealed to me was the guitar work on this song. In a decade of squealy solos and beefy barre chords, this was a song with gorgeous semi-acoustic resonance and curious augmentation. The lyrics told of a life in temporary limbo with an uncertain hope that things would eventually get better. The video manages to capture that perfectly, with Neil walking through room after dusty room, with his bandmates doing all sorts of mundane things like ironing, having breakfast, rehearsing their music. The payoff at the end isn’t success, but escape: Neil finally exits the seemingly endless house, puts on his coat, and walks away into the brightness of the landscape, that emotional weight no longer on his shoulders.

I still hear this song now and again, often while at work. I still air-guitar that opening bass riff. It’s a fun song to play on my guitar as well. And the rest of their discography definitely gets its fair share of play here, as A is quite the fan!

Two hours into the future…30 years later

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120 minutes logo

The original late-80s opening I remember so well

Over the last few weeks, there’s been an uptick of newly uploaded videos on the 120 Memories YouTube channel that feature almost-full episodes of the venerated show.  There’s a few other channels out there showing partial episodes (usually the host segments but no music videos) like MrBriefcaseTV2 and other users.  There’s also the great reference website The 120 Minutes Archive, which provides extensive playlists of nearly every episode*, and links to the videos if they’re available.

* – Back when this site was first being built sometime in 2004 or so, I still had a lot of my old VHS tapes with many of the episodes, so I was able to provide them with a lot of playlist information.  A lot of the 1987-1989 episodes have my name listed on the site.

It’s fun watching some of these now, nearly thirty years later…

For instance, I remember watching the above episode as Dave Kendall (at that point still only the producer and doing the countdowns and new releases) featuring a segment on the then-new Sisters of Mercy album, Floodland.  Even though he treated it in his usual over-the-top way, dripping with snark and pomposity and just a hint of humor, that segment actually convinced me to go out and buy the album.

I’d say Kevin Seal was my favorite host, considering he played it like the student doing a show on college radio: the barest of preparation, rehearsal or professionalism, but he was having a hell of a fun time doing it.  It also helped that he was also the class weirdo out of all the veejays there at the time.  Dave Kendall was the station manager, doing what he could with what little he had on hand, more focused on providing awesome music than decent production.

Those early years were definitely lo-fi.  They’d become more slick during the early 90s when Nirvana & Co came in, followed by the Ultimate Music Nerd in the shape of Matt Pinfield in the mid to late 90s.  But those early years, that era from 1986 to about 1990 when it was still all about whatever was playing on college radio at the time, that was where it worked best.  It was the visual equivalent of turning on your favorite college station for two hours after everyone else had gone to bed.

WiS Notes: 1988 – The Best Year Ever

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When I started my research for the Walk in Silence project last year, I’d decided to write some personal notes and reflections on how college radio affected me in the late 80′s.  It was a brief overview of what I want to cover in this book that lasted for twenty-five installments, a sort of a detailed outline of memories, thoughts on influential (to me) bands and albums, friendships, and such.  I’ll be posting these sporadically on the site over the next few weeks or so.

 

1988 – THE BEST YEAR EVER

I suppose most of my love for the year 1988 comes from the fact that it was the second half of my junior year, the school year where I had the most fun and have the most fond memories.  After a good few years of feeling out of place and trying to find myself, meeting up with my friends of that year was definitely a positive for me.

There was also the burst of creativity I’d had as well.  Just before Christmas break in 1987 I’d had this goofy idea of wanting to meet up and jam with others to play this alternative stuff, now that I’d bought that bass guitar.  When I returned after break, I’d put up a flyer sometime in March  or April, looking for like-minded musicians.  Most people scoffed, but two people took the bait—Chris and Nathane.  On April 22nd we became the Flying Bohemians.

Which meant someone—all three of us, really—had to get writing with music.

This, in turn, gave me a new push that I needed for my writing.  Before then, I’d been writing (or at least attempting to write) novels, the major one being the Infamous War Novel.  During 1987 I wrote and finished a silly John Hughes-inspired screenplay, and started many later-aborted stories.  Once I started the Bohemians, however, this gave me the outlet of writing lyrics and poetry.  The early stuff was pretty bad, considering I was new to to the format (or at least coming back to it—I wrote poetry in fifth grade for a special project and still have that stuff lying around somewhere), but I got the hang of it pretty quickly.

A lot of the poetry was, at the time, inspired by the music I listened to.  A lot of the darker and weirder passages were inspired by the Cure (with a nice dollop of weird dreams I’d had that I’d use as a starting point), to the point that some were given subtitles of “The Cure.”  Another was called “Wire Sisters” as it had been inspired by the angular wordplay of Wire and the goth darkness of The Sisters of Mercy.

It would also be much later in 1988-early-1989 (my senior year) that I’d revive a story I’d toyed with earlier that would become Belief in Fate, a second person narrative (POV inspired by Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, which had just recently been made into a movie), a roman a clef about trying to get the hell out of a small town and yet still being anchored to it.  That story would, like the IWN, go through many different versions over the years until it became a non-fiction book—this one.

As for music, this was a year that just seemed to click for me and everyone else.  Many key albums came out this year (or had come out in late 1987 and were hot during 1988).  To wit:

Sinead O’Connor, The Lion and the Cobra.  This was released early November 1987, but it really took off in early 1988.  O’Connor played against all kinds of feminine stereotypes here–a bald head instead of long flowing locks, an occasionally booming voice that spiked your heart rather than soothed it, and lyrics that held nothing back.  It’s a stunning debut that has funk, Celtic, balladry, and gritty rock all in one place–no wonder so many American reviewers weren’t quite sure what to do with her.  The opening track “Jackie” is a perfect introduction: quiet and plaintive (and mixed low), ascending into deafening and primal (and overmodulated), all within the span of a minute or so.

Public Image Limited, Happy?  A lot of PiL fans tend to like 1986’s Album more (or perhaps their more adventurous early post-punk albums), and I believe even John Lydon thinks this album’s a bit too mainstream, but I quite like this one, and it got a lot of play on my walkman.  It starts with their excellent single “Seattle” and never lets up until the bizarre “Fat Chance Hotel”.

Depeche Mode, Music for the Masses.  An album from September 1987, and a massive breakthrough for the band.  After years of loyal fans but very little radio play in the States, this one featured some of their best songwriting and production (“Never Let Me Down Again”, “Strangelove”, and “Behind the Wheel” were the big singles) and gave them scores of new fans.  It paved the way for their next studio album two years later, Violator, which would of course bring them even more fame.

The Smiths, Strangeways, Here We Come.  Released on the same day as Depeche Mode’s album, this last studio album from the Smiths would be released soon after they’d broken up, but it remains a stellar final release.  Like most Smiths albums, it’s all too short and most of the titles seem longer than the songs, but many are catchy as hell.  This one also has a slightly different sound than most Smiths releases, perhaps a more mature sound, and it ended up being a good hint at what Morrissey’s solo album would sound like.

Cocteau Twins’ Blue Bell Knoll.  After years of being distributed stateside by the indie label Relativity, the band signed with major label Capitol and released a very strong album.  A little more upbeat than previous albums and EPs (and definitely more radio friendly than their previous two, the etherial Victorialand and The Moon and the Melodies), this one caught the ear of many a new fan and critic.  The track “Carolyn’s Fingers”, while not an actual single, got quite a bit of airplay on alternative stations and even had a video that got heavy play on 120 Minutes.  This one hit me as a gorgeous album that somehow aurally captured the mood and feel of a New England spring.  Very heavy play on my headphones that year, and a key album in my learning how to play the bass guitar.

The Church, Starfish.  Their make-it-or-break-it album, according to their history.  Many of their albums up to 1986’s Heyday were great albums, but never quite reached the heights they were looking for, even in their native Australia.  They decided to relocate to Los Angeles for this one, and their feeling of dislocation (so to speak) influenced the urgency and tension of these newer songs.  The opener “Destination”, for instance, is evidence of that.  Their big hit—at least in the US, as it barely made a dent in Australia the first time out—“Under the Milky Way”, is a thing of simple and beautiful brilliance.  Written about a nightclub they had frequented in Europe, it became their biggest and most well known hit, and my all-time favorite song.  It, as well as the rest of the album, oddly enough remind me of the feeling of sad inevitability that my friends were leaving for college in September.  Not necessarily the sadness I felt, but the determination that I would have as much fun hanging with them was I could until they left.  To this day this album reminds me of how close we were.  It also, through its jangly reverb sound, reminds me of Athol in the autumn.

Morrissey, Viva Hate.  Morrissey’s debut solo album.  After the acrimonious breakup of the Smiths, a lot of people wondered if Mozz could go it alone, without the songwriting of Johnny Marr.  With lyrics (and Stephen Street) on his side, he came out with a stunning debut that expanded the sound, something no one expected.  Gone was the trademark Marr jangle, replaced by strings and wistful melodies.  The first single, “Suedehead”, went over well, giving listeners a hint of things to come.  The second single, “Everyday Is Like Sunday”, went even further, encompassing both the strong writing and Mozz’s trademark lyrics of despair.  Out of all the former Smiths, he would end up being the most popular and successful.

Peter Murphy, Love Hysteria.  Murphy had been relatively quiet over the last few years after Bauhaus split…the other three kept themselves busy, David J going solo, and Daniel Ash and Kevin Haskins forming Tones on Tail before the three reunited and formed the enormously successful Love and Rockets.  Murphy, on the other hand, released an album with Japan’s Mick Karn under the name Dalis Car, before releasing a moderately successful debut, Should the World Fail to Fall Apart.  In 1988, however, he formed a new backing band (The Hundred Men, named after one of his lyrics) and recorded a fantastic sophomore album.  It was certainly an adventurous one, working from dark ballads like “All Night Long” and “Socrates the Python” to poppy and radio friendly atmospherics like “Indigo Eyes”, to anthems like “Time Has Got Nothing to Do With It”.  Unlike the harshness of the previous album, this one embraced the moodier, more ambient sound that Bauhaus was known for on their later albums, and would become his signature sound.  The first single “All Night Long” became a radio hit both on college stations and elsewhere, and its grainy-8mm, sepia-toned video was put on heavy-rotation on 120 Minutes.

Wire, A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck.  During the mid-to-late 80s, a number of bands and musicians mentioned this once-obscure British post-punk band as a major influence—many from Husker Du to REM looked to the band’s early albums and singles from the late 70s for their unique “angular” sound—punk that didn’t go where you expected it to.  The band originally split in 1982 for solo endeavors, but in 1986 they surprised everyone with a return, a new EP (Snakedrill) and a new sound they jokingly called “beat combo”.  They followed the EP with a new album (The Ideal Copy), and in 1988 they released an even more melodic follow-up, led by the poppy single “Kidney Bingos”.  Considered the most “pop” of their albums of this time, it was a welcome return for longtime fans, and a perfect introduction for new fans like myself.  Along with the follow-up single “Silk Skin Paws”, this album connected with many fans of challenging and interesting music.

Joy Division, Substance.  I mention this one, because the US had finally paid attention to New Order in 1987 with their compilation of the same name.  many were familiar with New Order by this time via that album and the movie Pretty in Pink (which featured three of their songs), so it only made sense for their American label to release a compilation of their previous incarnation—one that had a legend of its own in their tortured singer, Ian Curtis.  This album introduced Joy Division to many new fans (including myself), compiling early tracks with well known singles (“Transmission”, “She’s Lost Control”, “Atmosphere” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart”).  They were by no means brilliant musicians, but their hooks were definitely memorable, and inspired a whole new generation of musicians and lyricists.  “Atmosphere” is another of my all-time favorite songs (and as stated earlier, the origin of the title of this project) and one I equate to my senior year in high school…it was very much the soundtrack song of my last few days in my hometown.

The Sugarcubes, Life’s Too Good.  America’s introduction to Bjork started here with the deceptively poppy and quirky single “Birthday” (deceptive in that the song’s lyrics are a bit disturbing once you realize what it’s about).  The pixie-ish singer and her cohorts played a very off-kilter brand of Icelandic pop that was both danceable and weird.  Picked up by Warner and distributed with a bright highlighter-green cover, this was a big favorite on campuses everywhere.  They would eventually break out with a US tour alongside Public Image Limited and New Order.  The band only lasted for two more albums, but Bjork is still high-profile, both onstage and off.

The Godfathers, Birth School Work Death.  Not exactly a big name stateside, but a great punk album that has a pretty decent following.  These guys, formerly a psychedelic garage band called the Sid Presley Experience, took on the image of pinstripe suit-wearing gangsters and projected a frustrated anger different from any other punk bands of the time.  Think Johnny Cash if he was British and really pissed off.  My British friend Eric introduced me to this band, which would soon become a mainstay that year on 120 Minutes.  The title song was a frustrated, angry take on the “life’s hard then you die” theme, and a big college radio hit as well.  The album was all rockers, even the slower love song “Just Like You”.

Living Colour, Vivid.  I mention this one next because they shared a bill with the Godfathers on an MTV college campus tour later in 1989, which I want to see at UMass Amherst with Chris and Nathane.  I originally saw these guys as a more mainstream, less controversial Bad Brains, though in retrospect they were more of a Funkadelic-meets-Chili Peppers-meets-metal band.  Either way, their explosive debut single “Cult of Personality”, with its blaring guitar and drums and soulful voice of Corey Glover (LC fans will remember him in a bit part in Oliver Stone’s Platoon a few years previous), hit the airwaves in a huge way—enough that even straight rock stations were picking it up.  Years later this is still a staple on alt.rock radio.  The rest of the album is equally strong, loud and topical.

I could go on with more great albums that came out in 1988…at first I thought the only reason I enjoy these releases so much is because of the time frame—a happy time for my teenage years.  The more I look at it, however, the more I look at the history behind what prompted these releases, the more I realize that this was indeed a year of serendipity for many well-known and well loved musicians.  Some were coming off a tenure with a popular band.  Some were coming into their own after struggling without success.  Still others recorded a make-or-break album that pushed them further in the right direction.

When I read about how 1992 was supposedly “the year punk broke”, I always interpreted that as “the year it went mainstream,” and not exactly in a good way.  Not to sound like an indie poseur, but by 1992 there was such a glut of alternative bands that it all started getting watered down.

In 1988, though…that was the year when “college rock made its presence known”—it became a bit more acceptable to listen to the stuff without fear of contempt, when it started to infiltrate the rock airwaves on the right side of the dial.

15-19 October 2010, edited/amended 8 November 2011