
It was the first time for me to see Devo, it was on 14th October 1978, while my college roommates and I were watching an episode of ‘Saturday Night Live’. The first time, long ago, I came across a new visual perception in the process of “life”. I’m pretty sure that 98 percent of the viewers of the show would also say the same). And so this band that I had never heard of before and who was dressed in yellow jumpsuits stood on the stage and sang their brutal version of “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” looking like mechanical robots. A member of the group raised his arm immediately after the last chord, hinting how a Nazi salute could look like when the arm is slightly bent at the elbow. It wasn’t, but it was too close to being one to wonder. So, by this time, the punk revolution was already old news and a hundred percent of the attention was on the new wave. I have been a sex pistols sleaze barbed anarchistic fan fantasy boy, I listen to other bands including Ramones, Clash, Talking Heads, and so on, but not saying, that I am literally frustrated While Devo65 Facebookego performed on SNL, their rendition of Satisfaction, I was quite chill to the bones, panic, existential horror, super.
By the time the band was ready to perform their other song, “Jocko Homo”, I was able to somewhat understand them. Although, the image of Mark Mothersbaugh in a state of an infantile raging fit, while rolling out of his jumpsuit, and howling that ‘We’re pinheads now, we are not whole, We’re all actors, Jocko Homo’ still looked frightening. In that particular instance, I had no notion at all about what Devo was trying to say. Given everything, however, I wondered whether that reminiscence is what up-and-coming generations would be like. The very thought of it was extremely frightening.
I can only imagine how absurd my account must seem to all those fans of the Devo band who fell in love with it after its popular song ‘Whip It’ a self-help song matched with a rather controversial video that was released later. That was the song which to many Americans who had never heard of the band before, gave the band its initial break, a couple of years later the group had a track to go with and that was the song many Americans had been hearing. The last 2 decades, however, were starkly different and disturbing in that they turned the time experienced in turmoil from the time of the conflict into an enchanted fantasy realm controlled by music videos and sharp razor debates of Devo. But when you did get it, I mean really get it, there was plenty of ‘crazy’ out there which was also plenty of fun.
A documentary by Chris Smith called Devo paints the group as an exciting tone subject of the documentary. For 90 minutes the Devo fans are taken on a pleasant pop history tour, accompanied by the rather unreal transformed surrealist audiovisual material, which is entertaining. However, even when I saw the picture, I still recall thinking that what I saw could be rightly described as looking into the functional side of Devo in 1978. The group did not simply sing their songs accompanied by the tagline that we need to be educated to “de-evolve”. But what they did represent was a post-apocalyptic portrayal.
Here students formed around, looking dazed and jumping up and down in excitement. Even today, almost 50 years later, the statement sounds strange and controversial, but this depiction does not fit perfectly, we have no other words that would accurately describe the experience. It was the saturating sound of Devo that penetrated the punk genre in which they sound very catchy, accompanied by riffs typical of the genre, though, the lyrics suggest they visited an apocalyptic future. Quite funny actually, since it portrays them in a peculiar light.
But for Devo, this part of the biography is particularly fascinating. Because this was a group that had the most bizarre origins: This was a group that started out being what I wished to become. Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, the founding members of Devo, were, once again, born in the sprawling Soviet City of Akron, Ohio, back in the 1950s but during that time, would have exaggerated to hail from a swamp in Kentucky. The protest marches on the Kent State campus turned out to be occupied without the involvement of four students who were shot by the troops of the National Guard during the Vietnam War.
Of course, there emerged a tragic fable that is part of the history of counterculture and which influenced both Mothersbaugh and Casale greatly. “There would be no Devo without Kent State,” says Mothersbaugh in the film. He and Casale consider their dreams of leftist idealism of the time they were creating the story of the band but this idealism got broken on the day of the shootings. It was then that their way of thinking about everything that happened in this part of America started, and underwent some transformations in its content.
Their creative inspirations were varied and ranged from the Dada movement to a pamphlet released in 1933 that simply stated, “Jocko Homo,” but most of them had a hardcore focus on de-evolution. A picture featuring a person dressed in monkey outfits set a tone for them alongside the likes of Andy Warhol who was more known for his postmodern style and Charles Lacton’s iconic role as the brutal scientist in “Island of Lost Souls,” who changes animals into men the menacing Sayer of the Law a figure Sayer of the Law who made an exclamation of ‘are we, not men’.
With varying and devious ideas, Mothersbaugh along with Casale recited an upside-down Theory of Evolution. Mothhersbaugh along with Casale dedicated the music of Devo to that which they formed in 1973 which was an art and a novel when combined shifted for a couple of years.
Of course, this was not really to be taken literally (though there is something funny to Devo about pretending so), the entire we’re-devolving thing was, rather, a rather big metaphor. But what, exactly, was that a metaphor for? This is one place where I think the film falls a bit short on the issue of what is it that Devo was trying to say to the audience.
If by any chance, you have never encountered Devo before and you are watching it now, it would seem that the band possessed some rather ordinary old leftist anti-American attitude that people are used to. Apparently that’s how Mothersbaugh and Casale try to depict it in the movie during the years of post world war II period, America in the ’50s and ’60s used to look for a better tomorrow that warranted more social justice, more chances for everybody, and all other free world’s propaganda. But Mothersbaugh and Casale, who lived in the dull center of America-Midwest, started to see it in the ’70s that America was more of a tacky grimy, and poster-faced humping type of inspiration-deprived society that had been sold another version to.
That is acceptable though. To say that the Americans have rebelled in ways that fueled the hippie movement is an accurate count. The movie briefly explains who Devol was, when, showing the archives from the Kent State shooting, Mothersbaugh explains why they fought in the war: “From this, we remember that the struggle is pointless.”
Fantastic! This is a bold statement. The quote goes against the spirit of progress which was in the air at the time and even today. After all, if the insurgency after years sixty was less structured then the unwillingness to conform became an indelible part of middle-class identity. Disadvantage, to say the least. The Clash and others set out businesses selling ‘rebellion’ and several of the rebellious heavy metals joined in. Everything in the 80s is Harper Collins selling rebellion. Rebellion even today is sold via Social media.
It was yet another way of disorientating people by making them feel good about themselves. And what, in Devo’s view, had taken over and indeed devoured a 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.
Devo was signifying that the whole of America, including the rock’n’roll, was being engulfed by a gigantic spud that perceived the idea of the consumer culture as a chintzy world marketed as the expansion of the machinery capitalism through their absurdity on stage and their robotic singing. What the band was actually endorsing was the idea of “De-evolution”. It was more of a form of fascism to be precise. And they were clever enough to demonstrate this with their very silliness. Their music even with such straightforward rhythms and apparent order of command was quite fascist in nature. With the success of ‘Whip It,’ they claimed that mainstream due to its march to the Top 40. It was also quite fascistic. But America in which the 50s America fan will mark the beginning of fascism, will be dressed up as a cheery face with a snazzy ringtone.
As expected, Devo does not take that narrative too seriously and in that sense remains Devo to a great extent. Instead, the movie records the absurd adventure of this outlandish band that unexpectedly found popularity. The true story of the mashup reconstruction of their stage shows high art revisions with fierce antagonism from the audience at Akron Rock Joint into a complex and catchy multimedia performance. And, although they were not the first to choreograph videos (the Beatles deserve that), they may have been the first to create a parody of Dadaist music videos; 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.
That the band Devo claimed to have entered the punk scene at New York’s CBGB club But the Dead Boys were also known to have given them a thorough beating as they entered the club’s door might explain why the Ramones were later to be put among the reasons behind Devo too quite literally in that they decided their songs would be considerably better if played faster. It goes without saying that he has useful context when he invokes Lennon a couple more times, like when Lennon stalked onto the stage after “Uncontrollable Urge” and yelled the song “She Loves You” into his ears. He formed the band in 1976 and wanted to help them record an album but it never happened probably because of the time period he put himself in. The good news is that Brian Eno produced their first album because otherwise, one would lose such cross-dimensional radio material out there under incompetent supervision more characteristic of mid-20th century Britain.
The song “Devo” delves into Devo’s traumatizing experience with record labels, such as Warner Bros Label, which in fact did result in a legal dispute due to the Virgin tycoon, Richard Branson’s, efforts of trying to ‘buy out’ the band where no manager was present and thus the band agreed. Even more surprising to use the term loosely the movie bathes, in its own stylistic humor, in the self-invention of Devo is shown as violent and extremely focused on the image of the band’s first-ever rubber monkey masks, Booji Boy and the New Order’s crude and childlike oversized babies as a symbol of ironic simplicity, plastic JFK-hair helmets, sparkly red energy-dome hats quite the hats that, as a matter of fact, were handed out for free to every single 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 film showcases some of the incredible songs the band had, such as “Come Back Jonee”, “That’s Good”, and “Beautiful World” which is a rather humorous goose-step anthem. The band started to come apart in the mid-1980s following the launch of their 6th album’s release (although they went on some tours in the beginning which this movie should have elaborated upon). However, their moment passed only because their objective had been achieved. They had successfully communicated the message and we had enjoyed the dance. There was nothing left for us to do apart from observing the world’s decline.
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