A funny thing happened the other night while I was watching MTV. They were inaugurating a new feature (one hesitates to give this station credit for coming up with anything that might be remotely classified as a “show”; after all, their idea of creative programming is Monkees re-runs twice a day—or is it up to three by now?) apparently geared towards squashing all those accusations about how they hardly ever air anything that isn’t “formatconducive” in the form of a twohour block of so-called “alternative” and “avant garde” videos. The segment, entitled “120 Minutes” (like I said, creativity certainly does seem to run rampant around MTV), is supposed to provide the adventurous viewer with a glimpse of what host J.J. Jackson’s cue card calls “tomorrow’s videos today.” And, outside of the fact that they’ve deliberately stuck this program in that most coveted of time slots—Sunday at midnight—the thing does expose, however minutely, some worthwhile videos.

That’s not what struck me as funny, however. What got me was that while I was watching some of these videos, I started to sense some rummaging going on in the basement of my aesthetic sub-conscious. So, while my eyes were focused on Jane Siberry’s “One More Colour”—a delightfully outre clip featuring Siberry walking a cow (right, as in moo) down a country road while a family of very strange looking people sit staring at a screen showing a molecule getting all charged up in a house whose roof gets lifted off by a crane, thus “freeing” them to see the sky that Siberry believes could use "one more colour”—my brain starts telling me that there’s something very familiar about all the the imagery here. The juxtaposition of “real” and un-real (girl with cow, girl with cow hand puppet, nuclear family watching nuclear fission, etc.), the weird, happy-time look on everybody’s face, as if they’ve just been lobotomized, the same serious art/common nonsense atmospherics. Why it’s just like, just like...just like a Devo video, that’s it! The clip ends, and it’s announced that Jerry Casale directed it. Jerry Casale—from Devo! Interesting,