For Akron, Ohio, natives and fellow art students Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, and their various siblings and co-conspirators, the combination of multinational corporations, religion, government, and TV pointed them toward an inescapable conclusion: The world wasn't just getting dumber; it was actively devolving into a state of passive, drooling idiocy where any kind of atrocity was acceptable as long as it was wrapped in a bright package. Devo began life as an expression of outrage and disgust at the inevitability of a future where the world has mutated into unblinking blobs capable only of obedient consumerism. But that was a lot less fun than actually getting down in the dirt and wallowing inside the same corrupt, desensitizing system that was enslaving the nation. Devo should have been KISS's evil twin, a merchandisable monster that plastered its logo over every moment of our mindless existence. They were too weird to succeed. But with "Whip It," Devo collided with mainstream pop and allowed a momentary glimpse of what the world would have looked like if it danced in time to their tunes. It would have looked a lot like it does now.
JB: Getting older has its drawbacks. You pay doctors to fumble their way around your prostate. Also, you will probably never again listen to a piece of music and think, "I have never heard anything like that before!" Such was my reaction the first time John Peel played "Jocko Homo" sometime in 1978. It blew my teenage mind. If the taste-making late-night BBC DJ had announced he'd just played a record made by aliens, I would have believed him. "Jocko Homo" sounded like a national anthem of a country I never wanted to visit. Devo's problem was their timing. If a group like that, with their visual aesthetic, their brand awareness, and their dud-free early repertoire, emerged now, when nerds rule the world, they would be ubiquitous and instantly accepted. Instead, they had to settle for being the house band of the outcast, the socially awkward, the overexcitable, and the conspiracist. My kind of people.
LM: Devo scared the hell out of me. The "Jocko Homo" video seemed like a trailer for some freaky, sci-fihorror flick, and to my innocent, preteen eyes, the "Whip It" video might as well have been pornography. Mothersbaugh whipping the clothes off the black woman. The cross-eyed Asian girl with the gun. The guy who forces himself on the Asian girl while his white girlfriend cheers him on: "Ride 'em cowboy!" I'd yet to learn about S&M or rape or masturbation, but I knew enough to run to the TV set to turn the dial if "Whip It" was on and my mother was coming down the hall. Years later, I'm impressed by Devo's brilliance and the obscure literary references and subversiveness they sank into their songs. Hard to believe that MTV, now a playground for reality-TV smut, was once the home of such edgy cultural commentary. But in the early eighties, those plastic-helmeted Devo dudes were as nightmarish—and as compellingly watchable—as Freddy or Jason.
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: Our goal wasn't to piss people off, but we were in a part of the world where there were a lot of things that were frustrating and crazy. Like people my age would sign up to go to Vietnam and defend democracy, and they'd come back and capitalism and democracy had decided that the reason why we were blasting away at people over in Asia was so it would be easier to set up factories over there so that our jobs in Akron could go over to Malaysia. It was a crazy time, and we decided that what we were observing was not evolution; it was more like de-evolution.
We were around for all the upheaval at Kent State. We were there for the shootings, and we saw all these people who had high ideals and wanted to change the world. Once people started shooting at them, they were like, "This is too heavy. I need to go back to being a student and not stick my head up and get shot at." We ended up looking around and saying, "How do you change things in this country?" It's not by rebellion. Rebellion gets hit over the head with a club and stopped very successfully. We were looking at who did change things and how they did it, and I remember feeing that the people who changed the culture the most were all on Madison Avenue. They were talking people into buying that new car they didn't need. They were convincing people there were germs in their sink even though they couldn't see them, but they could possibly be dangerous so you have to buy this special miracle blue cleaner. And yes, there is a cure for balding: It's called brown spray paint. You just spray it on the top of your head. They were selling all these insane products and doing it in an artistic way, and we thought that was subversive. We thought, If we're going to effect any change, the way to do it is you go into the belly of the beast.
GERALD CASALE: We became a performance art group, and a lot of it was based on aesthetic confrontation that wound up in verbal and physical confrontation. The more that happened, the more excited we became. The kind of crowds we were able to get in front of irritated us. The feeling was, If these people hate us, we're on the right track because we don't respect them either. We wore black plastic trash bags, poked holes in them for our legs to come out, taped them up around our necks so they wouldn't fall down, and we'd be naked [underneath]. And we wore clear plastic masks; they were creepy, they had lips and eyebrows. We would play local bars, and it would get really nasty. A guy would scream, "You guys are assholes!" And I'd scream back, "No, you're the asshole." Then he'd go, "I'm gonna smack your fucking head in!" And the club owner would come over with a couple of roadies, and we'd be forced to leave the stage. A guy gave us $75 once to stop playing. We really enjoyed that.
At the end of 1976, we were in a basement in a house in Akron practicing many nights a week for many weeks over and over and over. We were getting excited by the fact that we could really play together, and the excitement of live performance sped up our music. We saw the Ramones when we were in New York, and we were suddenly becoming part of something.
[A&R man] Kip Cohen called from A&M out on the West Coast. We were invited out to L.A. to showcase. He famously rejected us and hated us when he saw us. But we weren't going to take no for an answer. At our first performance, I had met Toni Basil, and she was friends with Iggy Pop, and she had dated Dean Stockwell. They had been hanging out with Neil Young. Pretty soon, we had four or five gigs lined up. It snowballed when unscrupulous managers and entertainment lawyers and record company A&R men started attending those shows, and pretty soon we had a bidding war.
We thought about Devo from the beginning as a multimedia band. Mark and I were visualists. We were art students. We thought we were going to put out video discs. We were reading all this stuff about video disc technology, and we thought, This is the future. We'll be like the musical version of the Three Stooges. We'll do short films that will feature a song we wrote. The productions will be music-driven, and we'll do enough of them to make an hour program, and we'll put one out every year. Oddly enough, that's not the way it worked out.
MOTHERSBAUGH: The first thing Warner Bros. said to us was "Why are you wasting your time making these movies?" We said, "That's part of our art—we're visually oriented artists. We're not just writing songs; we're making pictures to go with them." It took a number of years before MTV showed up and record companies noticed and went, "Oh, that's what you tricky bastards were doing." For the most part, they would use terms like "wacky" and "quirky." "Quirky" was a term to take anything we talked about that was serious and marginalize it.
CASALE: With MTV, we were the pioneers that got scalped. We'd had five videos done before MTV existed. Then MTV was just starting out in 1981, and they came to us and blew smoke up our butts. They told us how we were the future and so were they, and how we had anticipated how things were going and they were going to show the whole world our videos and make us huge. MTV came on in three cities, and, yes, they were playing Devo videos all day long. Then, as soon as they went national, they tied themselves to Top 40 mainstream-radio hits, and they started pulling Devo videos because the songs weren't on the radio. That was their excuse: "You guys don't have hits."
MOTHERSBAUGH: For survival, we needed to have some kind of an income. We were so far ahead of the curve that it really made sense at the time to crawl into the colon of Hollywood and attempt to impart our message through that methodology, to allow ourselves to be on The Dick Clark Show, to be on The David Letterman Show. We said, "How far can we get into this?" We thought the Devo aesthetic was strong enough, we believed in it enough and thought we were different enough that it could survive the acid test of Hollywood, and we had a modicum of success. We finally had a hit.
CASALE: We were still a band that cared about ideas and aesthetics, not sitting around trying to cynically write hits, and we didn't put something on a record unless we liked it. We didn't have any sense of "Oh, here's the hit!" The record company types came into the studio when we were making Freedom of Choice, and they all decided either "Girl U Want" or "Freedom of Choice" were the only viable radio songs. They went with "Girl U Want," and it promptly stiffed. They didn't even want to put out "Freedom of Choice." They were still arguing about spending any more money on us when [legendary radio influencer] Kal Rudman, independent of all that, made "Whip It" a hit. It isn't like Warner Bros. paid some independent promo man $200,000. They didn't spend money on Devo.
Lyrically, it was a parody. We were all big fans of Communist and Red Chinese propaganda, because intellectually you can't help but be drawn to it, and because it's so funny and the graphics that go with it are so powerful. It was really Thomas Pynchon's book Gravity's Rainbow that made me write the lyrics. In Gravity's Rainbow, he's writing these poems and lyrics, and they are parodies of Horatio Alger: You're number one! There's nobody else like you! You can do it! Americans, pick yourselves up by your bootstraps and you can make it! We thought, This is perfect. This is like the American version of Red Chinese propaganda. Our graphics taste ran toward Russian constructivism and Chinese government propaganda but, obviously, lyrically, we were more American. So I thought, I'm gonna write a Pynchonesque parody, and "Whip It" was my attempt at that.
Some people assumed it was an S&M song, so we wanted to fulfill their expectations with the video. Others thought it was about jacking off. Every time we'd do a radio interview, typically the DJs would be these leftover seventies hippies. They'd have the satin baseball jackets from the record company and the big pile of coke, and they'd go, "Whip it, dude. Heh heh heh!" and they'd make jerk-off moves. We'd start by telling them what it's actually about and that would bum them out, so then we realized we should just go along with it—"Right! Whip it! Heh heh heh! Ya know it!"—and then they liked it. We made sure the video reinforced the whipping idea by having Mark literally whip the clothes off the black woman in the ranch corral while the cowboys cheered him on. It was satire of all the horrible right-wing racist values.
Suddenly we were playing 10,000-seat arenas and getting taken a lot more seriously, and that gives you a lot more tools. But then, foolishly, we didn't change our aesthetic or our message or our disdain for stupid people or fundamentalist religion or power abuses.
"We thought, If we're going to effect any change, the way to do it is you go into the belly of the beast."
MOTHERSBAUGH: We were a divisive entity throughout our whole early record career. You would get people who were inspired by it—the future geeks, the people who turned into the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and the people who embraced technology and understood ironic humor. But Devo were never Bon Jovi–big. We were always on the outskirts of the culture. When we had a hit, it was a double-edged sword. When the next album came up, the record company, who had ignored us for the last three albums—it was great: They would give us enough money to put out another record, and we got to do what we wanted. By the fourth album, they were like, "Wait a minute. These guys brought in millions of dollars for us. We better keep an eye on them, make sure they don't fuck up." So the president of the company was like, "Hey, guys, do anything you want. Just do another 'Whip It.'" But we'd just done the same thing we'd always done, and "Whip It" just happened to connect with DJs.
We wanted our songs in commercials. People like Neil Young were like, "I would never let that happen to one of my songs." We thought, We want kids to hear those songs. "Freedom of Choice" is in a Target commercial. They go, "What is that song?" Then they go listen to the record, and they go, "Wait a minute. It says, 'Freedom of choice is what you got / Freedom from choice is what you want.' What does that mean?" We wanted kids to get sucked into our music, so we took advantage every time we got offered to license our stuff to commercials. That's how we'll affect people and change them. It would be kind of like letting evil Big Brother serve you up and Big Brother didn't even know he was doing it. These are the exact people who needed to hear our music and would never have heard it in a million years if it wasn't for one stupid song that fit into a dance club format. Some people came to our shows, and they're doing their stupid white-people dances to our song, and they're singing "Whip it good!" And then they buy the album, and they take it home, and they get served up a whole load of Devo.
CASALE: We were constantly trying to explain ourselves and present ideas, and they would get ignored or shot down. It was like the old TV series The Prisoner—you can't get out of the village. That was the irony, and that was exactly what Devo had been telling everyone: All this fake rebellion rock 'n' roll was just posing, and corporations were selling it. It had all been totally co-opted. We were elevating the whole idea of co-option as satire. When we said, "We're all Devo," we meant it.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Devo split in 1991. Mothersbaugh went on to a successful career scoring movies and TV shows. Casale has directed commercials and music videos. "Whip It" lives on in many commercials for household products, including Swiffer. In 2006, Disney attempted to launch Devo 2.0, a group of child actors performing songs from the Devo catalog aimed at the preteen market. The project was not a success. Devo 1.0, meanwhile, having re-formed in 1995, continues to release new music and tour.
"We made sure the video reinforced the whipping idea by having Mark literally whip the clothes off the black woman in the ranch corral while the cowboys cheered him on. It was satire of all the horrible right-wing racist values."
CASALE: Disney said, "We'd really like to do something with kids and Devo songs." They wanted the songs skewed for four- to seven-year-olds. I said, "What if we cast around for a kids band that can actually play, and we'll record them, and I'll shoot videos for the songs, and we'll make the kids into personalities and take them on tour for a year?" Disney loved it.
I spent a good part of a year getting the band together and ready to go out on a tour of middle schools. We were practically done, and the top brass at the Disney label wanted to see some of the video cuts. Suddenly, we were being asked to send over the lyrics to every Devo song that we'd shot. We get the big call: "You're gonna have to redo the lyrics." They were like, "'That's Good,' the whole third verse: 'Life's a bee without a buzz / It's only great till you get stung.' We know what you're saying. It means life's a bitch unless you're getting high, and life's only great until the cops pop you!" I was like, Wow, here's some suits that were raised on a breakfast, lunch, and dinner of hip-hop mentality, because those words were written in 1982, and it didn't mean any of that. We might as well be in Red China. The best was "Uncontrollable Urge." They said, "We know what an uncontrollable urge is!" We never said what the uncontrollable urge was. They said, "Exactly! It's the lack of definition. Those kids are going to think it means sex. Make it about junk food." This was going to play on the Disney channel in the afternoon. And what do they advertise: junk food and sugary cereals. I changed the lyrics. I wrote, "Before dinner and after lunch / I get so out of control I know I gotta munch," and our lead singer in Devo 2.0 is a 13-year-old girl, Nicole, and so they show it to their top brass, and they go, "We love it!" It sounded so filthy!
MOTHERSBAUGH: The Swiffer commercial was maybe the most pervertedly like a Devo video. Like, we would have found that footage and gone, "Let's use that!" 'Cause it was such hideous, moronic footage of a housewife dancing around her kitchen with a wooden floor mopping up with this stupid miracle mop. But by that point, "Whip It" had already been "Flip It," "Chip It," "Dip It." It's like they're injecting people with their stupid messages; they're the host mechanism for our virus. What did I just get? It wasn't "Snip It." Maybe it was "Clip It"? They did this commercial where they have factory workers singing "Rip It" for packaging things on pallets that are going to be shipped overseas. They have all these workers singing in this video that's one step above homemade. I really like it.
CASALE: Devo have been offered a ton of opportunities all the time that Mark scuttles, and I keep trying to see how many of them can survive. I'd be doing a Devo musical and a Devo movie, a Devo store, Devo products. Mark's the one that puts it into retirement. All he wants to do is composing for TV and films. At this point, I wouldn't even have the expectation of cooperation, just agreement not to stop it.
MOTHERSBAUGH: He's not being 100 percent honest. He is, in the sense that I put my attention in other places, but neither one of us can show the other a script they've come up with for a Broadway show that anybody wants to sign on to. Whatever the appearance is, my intentions are for the health of the band. If someone has a script that centers around the Devo songs or the band—although that, to me, seems less appealing than something that centers around de-evolution; you could do something very entertaining that talked about de-evolution—I haven't seen that script. If he knows about a script that I turned down, he should send it to me immediately.
CASALE: I just came to realize that what I think should be any opportunities and potentials that should define Devo are not reality.
MOTHERSBAUGH: I feel like Devo should have done what Kraftwerk did, connecting with the Museum of Modern Art. Maybe I am the source of all the problems, but I don't really think so. Who knows? Maybe there's still time for Devo, part 3.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs by Bands of Weirdos 1. "Making Plans for Nigel," XTC 2. "Rock Lobster," The B-52s 3. "The Number One Song in Heaven," Sparks 4. "Human Fly," The Cramps 5. "Once in a Lifetime," Talking Heads
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