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120 REASONS TO LIVE

120 Reasons To Live: Yo La Tengo

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.

#66: Yo La Tengo “Sugarcube”

A few disclaimers: This video for 1997’s “Sugarcube” falls well outside the range of what we’ve previously considered the “classic” era of 120 Minutes. But it’s Yo La Tengo. Deal with it. Also, the video’s “rock school” concept predated Jack Black comedy School of Rock by six years, so the funny quotient—greatly aided by Mr. Show‘s David Cross and Bob Odenkirk—wasn’t at all diminished at the time. Indie rock was booming in 1997, and amid the raft of great albums from up-and-comers Spiritualized, Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith and Belle & Sebastian was the quiet (or actually quite noisy) greatness of Yo La Tengo’s I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. We never thought YLT needed any further rock ‘n’ roll instruction after that album, but we did once send frontman Ira Kaplan to gather wisdom from a master: He interviewed the Kinks’ Ray Davies for a MAGNET cover story in 2008.