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.
#15: Tackhead “Ticking Time Bomb”
Maybe it’s some sort of fallacy of memory, but the early years of alternative rock could be surprisingly inclusive. If you don’t have the option of a hundred bands that sound like Pearl Jam, you just might wind up listening to experimental industrial/dub by default. At least some snippet of Tackhead’s “Ticking Time Bomb” probably sounds familiar to you; bands that used spoken-word samples (Negativland, whatever Al Jourgensen project you care to name) tend to have that effect. Tackhead’s roots stretch all the way back to the beginning of hip hop, and its core trio can be heard on seminal recordings by the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash (notably, “The Message” and “White Lines”). These facts may not have impressed your average MTV night owl in 1989, the year “Ticking Time Bomb” appeared, but then again they didn’t need to. Programmers were still defining the alt-rock demographic, and thankfully had not yet whittled it down to the narrow sonic parameters that eventually killed it.
