After the arrival of Surfer Rosa in 1988, Pixies became the unavoidable new darlings of the college rock circuit—as this segment from MTV’s PostModern MTV from early 1989 amply demonstrates. PostModern MTV was kind of a truncated weeknight edition of their long-running 120 Minutes, which offered “underground” rock for a two hour programming block on Sundays.

In an MTV News segment hosted by Kurt Loder, the band is introduced purchasing knishes on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan. Still known officially then as “Black Francis,” Frank Black is quoted as saying “We just wanna make everyone spine-tingly and everything.”

The original host of the show, Kevin Seal, kicks things off but then the four Pixies themselves take over—this YouTube video shows their bumpers and video intros but not the videos themselves. The bits were taped at the much-missed Scrap Bar on MacDougal Street in the West Village following a highly “clever” conceit that actually just comes off as “awkward.”
 

 
Seated behind a heavy iron grate, the band members were tasked with presenting their palaver “telepathically”—that is, keeping their mouths shut and gesturing emphatically in sync to pre-taped audio bits imparting the relevant info. Just watch it, you’ll see. It’s a good reminder of the tryin’-too-hard ethos of what would soon become associated with Generation X. In retrospect, perhaps the band members’ obvious discomfort with the setup was itself kind of a coded message to their collegiate (and college-adjacent) faithful.

Towards the end of the episode the band runs through the top ten “PostModern” videos, whatever that means, and based on the tracks that made the list that week, I’d peg this segment at June 1989, which was a couple of months after the release of Doolittle and also around when “Here Comes Your Man” came out. Anyone born during the Nixon administration is likely to have some strong opinions about the bands that charted that week:
 

1. The B-52s, “Channel Z”
2. 10,000 Maniacs, “Trouble Me”
3. Pixies, “Here Comes Your Man”
4. The The, “Gravitate to Me”
5. Love & Rockets, “So Alive”
6. The Cure, “Fascination Street”
7. Hoodoo Gurus, “Come Anytime”
8. PiL, “Disappointed”
9. The Call, “Let the Day Begin”
10. Adrian Belew, “Oh Daddy”

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The Pixies ‘unplugged’ at the Newport Folk Festival (full set)