Dick Clark, who died Wednesday at age 82, and ‘American Bandstand’ played an important role in the ’80s, too, helping bring the burgeoning New Wave and college rock scenes to mainstream America at a time when the still-nascent MTV wasn’t universally available on American cable networks.

Saturday night, following an eight-year absence, MTV’s iconic alternative-music show ‘120 Minutes’ returned with a new format and a familiar face: late-’90s host Matt Pinfield. The whole show is now online; watch it here.

This is a little more mainstream than what we usually cover, but it’s hard to deny the significance: Thirty years ago today, on Aug. 1, 1981, MTV went on the air (‘Ladies and gentlemen, rock ‘n’ roll…’), changing the course of music in the ’80s and beyond.

Daniel Ash — he of ’80s darkwave trifecta Bauhaus, Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets — turns 54 today, and to mark the occasion, we present this little nugget: It’s a promo for MTV’s ‘120 Minutes’ featuring a cue-card reading Ash and his Love and Rockets bandmates David J and Kevin Haskins that aired sometime around 1986.

Twenty years ago today, the Perry Farrell-spawned Lollapalooza festival — which, in retrospect, joins Nevermind as perhaps the best historical encapsulation of ‘the year punk broke’ — made its debut in the sun-baked Arizona desert with performances by Nine Inch Nails, Living Colour, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Jane’s Addiction.

Since the announcement last month that MTV plans to revive its ‘120 Minutes’ franchise as both a new monthly TV show and a quick-hit web series, the music-averse network has begun populating its MTV Hive website with performances by the likes of The Cure, Pixies, The Jesus and Mary Chain and World Party.

MTV announced today that it will revive its hugely influential Sunday night alternative-music video outlet ‘120 Minutes’ as a weekly online series called ‘120 Seconds’ hosted by Matt Pinfield on web portal MTV Hive and a monthly show that will be televised on sister network MTV2.