Some Thoughts on Dave Kendall and the Magic of MTV’s 120 Minutes

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…