Devo

Devo
Devo

I shall always remember the first time I saw Devo. It was on October 14, 1978, while my college roommates and I were watching an episode of ‘Saturday Night Live’. Devo, a band I had never heard of before (I’m pretty sure that 98 percent of the viewers of the show would also say the same) and who was dressed in yellow jumpsuits stood on the stage and sang their brutal version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” looking like mechanical robots. When the last chord was played, one of the group members raised his arm in a way that faintly resembled an outstretched arm in a Nazi salute. To be honest, it wasn’t, but it was too close to being one to wonder. By this time, the punk revolution was already old news and hundred percent of the attention was on the new wave. I have been a fan of the apocalyptic barbed anarchy of the Sex Pistols; I have listened to Ramones, Clash, Talking Heads, and many others. But really I am not exaggerating: what really terrified me was Devo performing ‘Satisfaction’ at ‘SNL’. They chilled me to the bone.

When the group returned to play their follow-up tune “Jocko Homo” I had come to terms with the situation and was a little bit more prepared for them. Still, the sight of Mark Mothersbaugh screaming, ‘We’re pinheads now, we are not whole,/We’re pinheads all, Jocko Homo’ and rolling out of his jumpsuit as if he is in some kind of infantile possessed frenzy was still…daunting. At that point, I didn’t have a single clue as to what Devo’s concern was, but leaping ahead there, all I could think was: is this the sound of the forthcoming generations? The very thought of it was extremely frightening.

For the millions of Devo fans who were hooked on the band because of their song “Whip It,” a catchy self-help anthem with a suggestive music video that was released later, my story must sound ridiculous to them. It was a snowballing hit of theirs a couple of years later when the band broke into mainstream with that track which is the song for many Americans who never heard of them. The latter pair of decades were dark and troubling, transforming the time of the conflict into Devo’s own chaotic mad world dominated by music videos and sharp razor arguments. But when you got it-really got it-it was crazy out there and great fun ‘crazy’!

Chris Smith’s “Devo” is a documentary that is as enjoyable as the subject matter. It is 90 minutes of oh-so-pleasant pop history for Devo followers and is incredibly transformed surrealist audiovisual footage. But watching the film, I could still discern what I classified as peering into an operational element of Devo back in the year 1978. The group did not just perform their songs, or lecture fans about “de-evolution”. They represented an end-of-the-world image. Now, almost 50 years later, it is true, but you did not require the last 50 years to understand that. It was understanding Devo that left an impression that they were right. Together. They made songs that were unbelievably catchy in that slamming guitar way that is punk, but they also portray that they’ve been to the future, and it’s horrible.

All of them doubtlessly visit the very beginning, when the artists to whom the music documentary is dedicated started. But as for Devo, this part of the biography is particularly intriguing. Because this was a band with the strangest roots possible: a band that grew up as something evolved, as a creature already sprawling on land but completely unaware of what it was. Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, founding members of Devo, were born in 1950 and 1948, respectively, and they came from the Kentucky swamp which was the bustling Soviet city of Akron, Ohio. The two met at Kent State University and just happened to be present at the May 4 protests, which were during the Vietnam War when four students were shot by National Guard troops and many others were injured.

Naturally, there developed a sad fable belonging to the history of the counterculture and it had a great impression on both Mothersbaugh and Casale. “There would be no Devo without Kent State,” says Mothersbaugh in the film. He and Casale look back at their leftist idealism dreams when they were forming the band’s history, but this idealism was shattered on the day of the killings. It was then that their thinking about what was really going on in the United States began evolving.

They were inspired by a number of different things that had come over the years. These included the Dada art movement which is said to have emerged in the early 20th century, a provocative pamphlet from 1933 that said ‘Jocko Homo’, pictures of a person adorned with monkeys, and the word “de-evolution”; as well as Andy Warhol who is known for his postmodern parodic style and the defining picture that had a great impression on them which was ‘Island of Lost Souls* starring Charles Lacton as a crazed scientist attempting to change animals into men, which gave birth to the well-known concept saying ‘Are we, not men? which is known to have been exclaimed by Sayer of the Law who was played by Bela Lugosi.’

Armed with fresh ideas, Mothersbaugh and Casale had the thoughts of an upside-down Theory of Evolution. In 1973, when Devo was formed, Mothhersbaugh and Casale were looking for novel ways to express the art, and in this case the alteration to the theory of evolution, through music, an effort that they finally managed to achieve a few years later.

Of course, this was not really meant literally (though there is something amusing to Devo that they pretended so), the whole we’re-devolving thing was, rather, a grand metaphor. But what exactly was it a metaphor for? Here is one instance where I feel that the documentary lacks a bit in explaining of what exactly it is that Devo was trying to communicate to the audience.

In case you’ve never come across Devo before and you’re watching it now, it would appear that the band had some rather generic old leftist anti-American message that people have grown accustomed to. Seemingly how Mothersbaugh and Casale try to present it in the film, in the ’50s and ’60s America kept telling us of a better tomorrow of more social justice, of more prosperity to all and all the bells and whistles that post World War II propaganda boasted. But Mothersbaugh and Casale, growing up in the dull heartland of America the Midwest, started noticing in the ’70s that what they saw around them was a ravaged, gaudy, billboard-plastered, hunching over and awaiting the grave type of society which did not seem to live up to the promise of its predecessors. If anything, it was going down, albeit slowly.

Fair enough. Nevertheless, that is the very point Americans were against which had fueled the hippie counterculture. One line in the film that starts to suggest what Devo was really about comes when Mothersbaugh looking back at the Kent State protest and shooting simply remarks, “One thing we learned from that is that rebellion is redundant.”

Incredible! That is a very strong statement. It is not a statement that would have been in line with progressive thought at the time; it is still not a statement that is in line with progressive thought. After all, if the rebellion was less organized after the ’60s, it became much more ingrained into the identity of the middle class – one could say disadvantage. The Clash and other bands (including heavy metal ones) made a career out of selling rebellion. 80s indie rock was all about selling rebellion. Rebellion, even now, is sold by Social media.

What Devo was saying was that “rebellion” is no longer a solution to The System because it has been completely absorbed within The System. It was yet another way of disorientating people by making them feel good about themselves. And what, in Devo’s view, had taken over indeed devoured rebellion? Simply put, it was conformity. (That’s one of the reasons why rebellion became obsolete: it was about supplanting your ‘protest’ psyche into the rest of the people’s.”) What Devo was saying was that even ‘progressive’ types were now dwelling in an orthodox world of templates of order where counterculture was impossible because the culture, in general, had already snatched it.

With their silliness on stage and robotic vocals, Devo was telling us that all of America, including rock’n’roll, was turning into a giant spud that grasped this idea of the consumer culture, popular culture, and political culture being just a further extension of the rich world of machinery capitalism. “De-evolution” was not what the band was really standing for. It was fascism. And they were clever enough to illustrate this with their own stupidity. Their music even with such straightforward rhythms and apparent order of command was quite fascist in nature. When they had mainstream success because of ‘Whip It,’ they played around the idea that the Top 40 was fascistic. However, in the new America that stems from the 50s, fascism will now be packaged in the form of a happy face and a catchy tune.

Devo, of course, maintains the character of Devo by not taking too much of this seriously. Instead, the film charts the impossible journey of this extremely unlikely band that became a hit. It tells us how they developed their stage show high art revisions that were fiercely turned against the audience at the Akron rock joint into an accomplished and catchy multimedia spectacle. And while they were not the first to do videos (the Beatles deserve that), they might have been the first to make a parody of a Dadaist music video, we see the small films they did with Chuck Statler for Jocko Homo and other tracks and while at that time very rudimentary, they remain as scathing as they were.

Given that Devo is often claimed to have entered the punk scene in New York’s CBGB club with Dead Boys beating them up as they walked in, it should come as no surprise that the Ramones were also among the inspirations behind Devo going forward, quite literally as they decided that their songs would sound even better if they were played faster. He also has a helpful background when he recalls Lennon a couple more times, such as when Lennon approached him on stage following “Uncontrollable Urge” and screamed the lyrics to “She Loves You” at him. David Bowie started the band in 1976 and approached them with the intention of producing an album, though this was never realized, presumably due to his self-imposed period. Fortunately, Brian Eno was entrusted with their first album, as anyone else could misplace their cross-dimensional radio material under more than incompetent mid-century British supervision.

The track titled “Devo” explores Devo’s history of bad record labels starting from the one they had with Warner Bros Label, which indeed got into a court case after Richard Branson, the Virgin tycoon, tried to win them over and the band, having no manager, complied. But even more striking, so to speak, the film rejoices, with its visual wit, in how Devo’s self-creation turned out to be aggressive and highly image-oriented rubber monkey masks, Booji Boy, and infantile giant babies who personified the sarcastic purity of the New Order; plastic JFK-hair helmets, glossy red energy-dome hats quite the hats that, as a matter of fact, were handed out for free to every member of the audience during the Sundance premiere of the picture and which, quite frankly, my college mates and I would have termed ‘real devo’ (no, that is not meant to be a compliment).

The movie reminds you just how many great songs they had, “Come Back Jonee”, “That’s Good” and “Beautiful World” which is an ironical goose-step anthem that stays with you The band phased out, somewhere in the mid-’80s, after the release of the 6th album (albeit they did tour in the end which are things that this film should’ve emphasized more). But their moment passed only because their mission was completed. They had delivered the message, we had listened to it and we had danced. There was nothing left to do but sit and watch the world regress.

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