New signals of Devolution

The trails we often follow to discover new and intriguing paths in rock music have led us to look back at the past, frustrated by a shortage of solo artists or bands truly capable of thrilling us. Devo, whom we remembered for the extraordinary video of their cover of the Rolling Stones' “Satisfaction”, rekindled a light that had been languishing in the dustiest, most alluring corners of our memory.

Devo were pure genius: fierce icons of a synthetic, serialized society, they created a genre that was utterly new and revolutionary, still ripped off to this day by many bands hailed as innovators. From them came a hybrid, monstrous music, an electronic punk that needed the imagery of its exceptional inventors to truly work. Thanks to Devo, a brand-new rock aesthetic took hold of the public imagination. A sharp, intelligent irony, a comedy that's at times grotesque, shines through in their videos, along with a philosophy and social critique that were anything but obvious.

They formed in 1974 in Akron, Ohio, USA, on the initiative of Gerard Casale and Robert and Mark Mothersbaugh, all guitarists and all singers, under the name Devo, a contraction of De-Evolution. Their performances were built above all on the way they presented themselves to audiences as absurd symbols of a techno-robotic man in the style of Kraftwerk. They moved in synchronized jerks and were all dressed and made up identically, giving the impression of being truly lifeless dolls. Kids of the time were instantly struck by these bizarre theatrical-musical spectacles, and the fad of the toy-man began to seep into the fabric of new wave. De-Evolution is nothing but the reverse of Darwin's theories, a regression of the standardized human being, identical to his fellow man in every respect - in gestures, words and ideas - who entrusts the automatism of machines with solving his own problems.

Their music, reckless and spasmodic, is perfectly complementary to their jittery movements, to the tics that have influenced so many artists, including the excellent Daft Punk and David Byrne, who has always been a great admirer of the American group. The Scottish musician himself, on his album “Feelings” (1997, Luaka Bop), fully revisited Devo's imagery, turning himself into a sort of GI Joe straight out of a model kit box. Of these resurfaced suggestions, the advertising world has plundered everything it could.

They debuted in 1978 with the album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, a galvanizing blend of a thousand genres: rock, folk, gypsy music, synth-pop, blues, beat. Constant contractions and syncopations, breathtaking changes of direction and a hefty dose of self-irony dictate its odd-metered rhythms. All the elements described here, and many others left unmentioned, make this record an endless source of inspiration as well as an absolute masterpiece in the history of rock'n'roll. Mark Mothersbaugh, in his Joker persona, sounds paranoid, unsettling and pained as he delivers the lines of "Jocko Homo", the thunderous, historic Devo manifesto. But the album also boasts the frantic pace of "Mongoloid" (another of their big hits), along with the whiplash mechanical progressions of "Sloppy" and "Uncontrollable Urge".

Are We Not Men? was followed by Duty Now For The Future (Warner Bros, 1979, featuring "Blockhead"), Freedom Of Choice (Warner Bros, 1980, with the title track and "Girl U Want"), New Traditionalists (Warner Bros, 1981, with "Beautiful World"), and Oh No It's Devo (Warner Bros, 1982, with "Peek-A-Boo", later covered by Siouxsie & The Banshees), all of which, with varying fortunes, chase the brilliance of their early work.

As for their later output: Shout (Warner Bros, 1984), Total Devo (Enigma, 1988) and Smooth Noodle Maps (Enigma, 1990) feel, as often happens with great artists, like pale, late-career echoes of a glorious past.

Even on Something For Everybody (2010), Devo seem set on a path toward mournful ordinariness. It becomes fairly easy to understand why one scrambles to find a new "Girl U Want", circling around it starting with the single "Fresh", which dishes out the usual keyboard riff backed by regulation stop-and-go dynamics and an obligatory catchy little chorus. Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come with "Please Baby Please", which aims to give us a jovial take on Suicide but ends up a Pokémon-style evolution of the "Macarena", or in the uncritical deployment of Casio-style synthetic wares on "Mind Games".

The ambition is to conjure the good-time vibe of a party album, but the forced irony doesn't hold up, lacking the necessary lightness. So much so that the only bright spot comes with track 11, "No Place Like Home", which drops the gratuitous crowd-pleasing to settle into a tasty cocktail somewhere between early Julian Cope and the ever-enduring Ultravox.

In their happiest period, Devo captured in music—much like Ernst Jünger's Treatise on the Rebel—with intellectual wit and precision, the decline of modern man and his fears growing in step with technological progress, along with the self-celebration and exasperated self-satisfaction that are the melancholy reflections of capitalist civilization.

Contributions by Marco Bercella ("Something For Everybody")

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