120 Reasons To Live: Mojo Nixon

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.

#22: Mojo Nixon “Elvis Is Everywhere”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_hkIN38qnY

Sometimes the comedy from your youth doesn’t really hold up. You’d have to be in intellectual traction to laugh at the same Naked Gun gags from the ’80s; even a recent re-watching of a Kids In The Hall episode was mildly depressing. “Elvis Is Everywhere,” on the other hand, is still funny. In the early years of 120 Minutes, Mojo Nixon served as the program’s court jester, occasionally hosting (at least once, maybe more) with sidekick Skid Roper. If you didn’t live through the ’80s, please do note the Michael J. Fox line (the evil opposite of Elvis) and the weird fact that, yes, Elvis sightings were a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. “Elvis Is Everywhere” comes from 1987’s Bo-Day-Shus!!!, and subsequent singles applied the same formula to different targets: “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child” (1989) and “Don Henley Must Die” (1990). Nixon went on to work as a radio DJ and “unretired” to issue an album in 2009.

Enjoy your lunch just a little bit more today, knowing that Elvis is in your cheeseburgers.