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120 REASONS TO LIVE

120 Reasons To Live: Robyn Hitchcock

Nothing did more to further the cause of Alternative Nation-building than 120 Minutes, MTV’s Sunday-night video showcase of non-mainstream acts. For nearly two decades, the program spanned musical eras from ’80s college rock to ’00s indie, with grunge, Britpop, punk, industrial, electronica and more in between. MAGNET raids the vaults to resurrect our 120 favorite and unjustly forgotten videos from the show’s classic era.

#116: Robyn Hitchcock Owns This Channel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UzmtXKxJnA

If the price was reasonable, we’d buy a full-length recording of Robyn Hitchcock simply talking. It’s possible that no human has strung together more original sentences than him. It must be exhausting being Robyn Hitchcock. In an earlier post we bemoaned the lack of his videos on YouTube (though “Balloon Man” sneakily appears here in crap-o-vision), but this series of between-clip banter might be even better—even Dave Kendall seems impressed. “I didn’t want to worship the devil,” Hitchcock tells him, “so I came to Manhattan.” The context here is funny, too; just think of the sad beauty of a song such as “She Doesn’t Exist,” from Hitchcock’s 1991 album Perspex Island, having to rub up against the silver body paint of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away” on the record-store shelves and college-radio airwaves. There oughta be a law.