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120 REASONS TO LIVE

120 Reasons To Live: Superdrag

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.

#56: Superdrag “Sucked Out”

“Who sucked out the feeling?” was one of music’s great unanswered questions when it was posed by Knoxville, Tenn.’s Superdrag in 1996. Then two years later, somebody else came along and asked the question, “Who let the dogs out?” and we forgot all about Superdrag’s query and started pondering the dog-release issue. Maybe that’s not quite how it happened, but in the new-band-a-minute mid-’90s, details often get confused. (Such as the fact that Supergrass and Superdrag are not actually the same band with different accents.) Like labelmates and tourmates Nada Surf, Superdrag got its one hit with Elektra (the major label was presumably did all the sucking out of the feeling) and was dropped. And like Nada Surf, Superdrag did just fine afterward, particularly on 2000’s In The Valley Of Dying Stars. Frontman John Davis later broke up the band and became a born-again Christian, releasing two albums under his own name. Last we spoke with Davis, he reunited Superdrag for a tour in 2009.