"I'm taking a ride with my best friend"

I have previously written in my music posts about how important the old MTV show 120 Minutes was to my musical horizon-broadening. It was an alternative video show that came on every Sunday night at midnight. In my post about New Order, I wrote this about the video for "True Faith":

The video had me hooked; it was delightfully quirky, kind of random, with big styrofoam people beating each other and rolling around in some sort of styro-arena, with some weeble-wobble styrofoam woman doing sign language. I thought it was brilliant, so I would watch for it all of the time. After a few viewings I started paying attention to the actual song, and I found that I loved it as well. It is a very dancey, synthy-type song, but with lots of guitar and great vocals as well.

Side note: As I finished typing this paragraph, "True Faith" just came on the television on the new music channel Tube. It is playing now. Cosmic.

And when I wrote about The Smiths, MTV played a vital role:

One day, I saw the premiere of a song called "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard this One Before" by The Smiths. I had run across the group in my reading about music, but I had never heard any songs . . . . . . and so I rushed out and bought the album. And then I rushed out and bought their other albums.

Finally, in my essay on Depeche Mode, I wrote the following:

When I was a freshman in high school and deep in the throes of my "Beatles year," I started watching a lot of alternative videos on MTV. One such video was a song called "Never Let Me Down Again," which I thought had a very good beat and bass line, plus I loved the singer's voice. I had heard of Depeche Mode -- they had a minor Top 40 hit a few years prior with their classic "People are People" -- but I had never really given them much thought. That is, until I saw this video for "Never Let Me Down Again." So of course I rushed out to Musicland and bought their album, Music For the Masses.

Clearly, MTV's support of alternative music in the late 80s changed my world. And so with the glory that is YouTube, I thought I would offer up these three important videos for your perusal.

New Order - "True Faith"




The Smiths - "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard this One Before"




Depeche Mode - "Never Let Me Down Again"