Devo

After this, I became a big Devo fan, and quickly went out and bought their other two records – Duty Now for the Future and Freedom of Choice – and I started unraveling the Devo story. Devo, as it turns out, was formed by two disillusioned college students at Kent State who had witnessed the National Guard’s murder of student protestors. Devo is short for “de-evolution”, the idea that we have passed our peak as a species and have started to sink back towards the primordial goo from whence we came. Now that we had more or less conquered natural selection, we are encouraging stupidity by not letting it die off and we are polluting the species just as much as we are polluting the planet. Now, I know these are dangerous concepts to bandy about, and it was just such a road that the Nazi’s started walking down in the '30s, but Devo is less of an instigator than a chronicler. After all, instigating would be far too proactive for a band like Devo. They just want to point out how far we’ve fallen while simultaneously celebrating and condemning our fall from grace. And besides, they’re not saying one race is weaker than the other. Everybody is suspect. We’re all Devo, they cheerfully taunt. Don’t be ashamed of your heritage, grab another beer and sit back there on your couch, you big spud, you beautiful mutant. Three cheers for mediocrity and alienation. Hip Hip Hooray! Hip Hip yeah, whatever.

Although they started as a guitar band, they quickly realized the potential of synthesizers to bolster up their cause and to suck the soul out of their music (soul being so evo), and by their third and most popular album, Freedom of Choice, they were almost entirely synthetic. Although it may lack the apocalyptic vision of the first album (and what could be more de-evolutionary than to have each new record be slightly less interesting and adventurous than the one before?), Freedom of Choice is what most people hear in their heads when they think of Devo – especially for that dance friendly hit Whip It. Although not the best song in their repertoire, Whip It is notable because it’s on that hit that Devo finally had the courage to completely devolve the very notion of a solo. In the center of the song, where the guitar solo usually goes, sits the perfect Devo deconstruction – one note repeated with perfect clockwork regularity at the beginning of each measure for eight measures while the drums continue beating out the lock-step rhythms with no flashy fills whatsoever. So uncool. So cool.

Eventually, Devo even managed to dip below my radar, becoming so devolved as to become a tired cliché, but they did rack up an impressive catalogue of stunning tributes to our decaying society in the 20 years they were together. And, although I never had the pleasure, they were supposed to be a phenomenal live band, stumbling around in their flowerpot hats. But for me, Devo will always be that moment, sitting in the empty dance studio, staring at the cover of their first album and listening to my the man who was my father storm out and slam the door. Are We Not Men?