Kevin Sent

I miss my 120 Minutes CDs.

Like many people, I was lured in by the iPod. I could have all of my music on a little machine? I wouldn’t need to store anything? Sign me up! In the early 00s, I was already sick of moving boxes around. I did brisk business offloading them-interestingly, a lot went to APO boxes-and I never really looked back. The future was bright, and it belonged to these cool new devices being sold to us by impossibly cool ads.

We didn’t think much about the second-order effects of offshoring all these things. Or how putting “earbuds” and later AirPods in would seal us off from other music fans, both literally and figuratively. This shift wouldn’t be the death knell for IRL music discovery, but it certainly put it in the ICU. Being able to access music online, on our own terms, also meant the end of relevance for shows like MTV’s 120 Minutes. None of that will be news, of course.

The big news this week is that former 120 Minutes host Dave Kendall has passed away.

I’ve touched on this before, noting:

It’s always a tell when someone makes a snide remark about remembering when MTV actually played videos. The channel answered the siren song of more eyeballs and pivoted away from music to other content, resulting in more people associating the channel with reality TV, outnumbering those who knew it for music videos. This is why Gen Xers regard MTV as a vehicle for music discovery, and Millennials regard it as where they discovered Snooki.

MTV had shows back then, of course. Yo! MTV Raps introduced a whole generation to the world of hip hop. 120 Minutes did the same for alternative/indie music, and this was when the term alternative still meant, well, alternative. NBC might’ve coined the term Must See TV, but for someone like my fellow travelers and me, this was the show to watch, even if it was on impossibly late. Sometimes that meant taping it and watching the next day after school (no internet = no spoilers). I got rid of those tapes, too. They’d be fun to watch, though.

They often let musicians from your fave bands host, and things would often get… interesting…I mean, does anyone else remember when Greg Dulli and Donald Logue hosted 120 Minutes?

For that matter, does anyone remember when MTV would just give 2 hours of airtime to people who’d do things like reenact scenes from The Godfather before teasing upcoming videos from “The Radiohead & The Pavement?”

Those were fun, of course, but the regular hosts were what made it great. Kevin Seal was as irreverent as anyone. Matt Pinfield’s encyclopedic knowledge was his superpower, and to be fair, one he only ever used for good. That would’ve made lesser men interminable.

But in between them was Dave Kendall. An affable guy with cool hair and a cool accent, both of which lent him more credibility than any other VJ, though I imagine metal heads felt the same way about Headbangers Ball hosts Adam Curry and Riki Rachtman.

Week in, week out, he would introduce legions of indie/alternative/goth kids to their new favorite bands. Alternatively, his would often be the only chance their fave current-band videos would ever see the light of day airtime.

In 2026, YouTube exists. In 1992, this was it.

“Dave was one of the true believers. Long before alternative music found its way into the mainstream, he was there every week on 120 Minutes, introducing people to bands that would go on to define an era. He didn’t just host a show. He gave a home to music that deserved to be heard. He loved the music, respected the artists, and connected with fans in a way that always felt authentic. “That’s a rare gift.”

~Matt Pinfield

It’s possible that Kendall was just reading cue cards or parroting what an A&R exec had handed him to read, but I doubt it, and if that’s the case, don’t tell me. He was a TV host, sure, but this was also a show whose idea he pitched and sold to the network. More than that, he was the man introducing us to a world of new bands and sounds. For those of us not yet in college, he was the substitute for the cool kid down the hall with the crate full of cool shit.

Today, you might get lucky and have the algorithm serve you up that sort of thing, but I doubt it. You can, of course, get anything you want anytime online- including links to every 120 Minutes episode and a list of hosts. This morning, I listened to a playlist I made via Qobuz. You can usually find “The Pavement” on there. You won’t find “The Radiohead.” It’s wild what you can build with 1’s and 0’s. That’s today’s version of the mixtape, but a lot of the tracks on there are bands introduced to me via 120 Minutes that later spent a lot of time on Maxell cassettes in my car. I watched the show and picked up copies (and later, picked up a pen). Others watched and picked up guitars. Those descendants often make these playlists, too.

It all makes for an incredible time to be alive, but there’s an electricity missing there. If you’re intentionally looking something up, it’s not the same lottery. Ultimately, that’s something people like me attributed to Kendall, and where much of that affinity lies. That his stint on the show neatly coincided with my peak music-discovery years doesn’t hurt. I hammered out a proverbial shitty first draft on Wednesday morning shortly after seeing news of his passing online. It would’ve been better to hear it via MTV News, but that too exists only as a memory now. I guess it’s cool that he outlived the network?

CDs are making a bit of a revival, so there’s that. Kendall would probably dig it. I’m taking some liberties here, but I like to think he was a CD guy, outside of DJ’ing, of course. Looking at the Nevermind the Mainstream comps now (online obvs.), the track lists for Volumes 1 & 2 read like who’s who of my favorite bands. To say that’s down to the influence of 120 Minutes and Kendall is not assumptive. I’m also confident there are a lot of people out there who would say the same.

If there’s any justice in the world, by now you’ll have seen many well-written obituaries, fueled by memories of people like me who used to stay up late just to see what Kendall would gift us next.

Thanks, Dave, and rest easy.