Devo didn't expect to be quite so prescient

Boston Globe

08-05-2025

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'We thought it was maybe a plausible pose and a warning, but that it wouldn't really go this far,' added Gerald Casale, the band's bassist and principal lyricist.
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On the Kent State campus, which had been convulsed by
A few years later, with the emergence of punk rock and the 'malaise' of the late 1970s, the cultural climate was ripe for Devo's purposeful absurdity. Their debut album, 'Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!,' produced by Brian Eno, came out in 1978. By the early 1980s, Devo's mechanical showmanship and outlandish matching costumes were an ideal fit for MTV, the new music video channel that was quickly overhauling the pop world.
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Casual fans know them as the weird band with the big new wave hit from 1980, 'Whip It,' which was vaguely about 'whipping' your problems. The band wrote songs called 'Space Junk' and 'Wiggly World,' recorded bizarro covers of 'Secret Agent Man' and '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,' and wore flowerpot-shaped 'energy domes' on their heads.
If the band's entire existence is a form of protest, Casale explained, the target is obvious.
'We're protesting stupidity,' he said. 'That often takes a political dimension, because everything ultimately is political, so you see stupidity and fear and superstition manifest itself in the political realm first.'
Despite their relentless criticisms, they did not consider themselves above the fray.
'We were putting ourselves in the quotient,' Casale said. 'We weren't exempting ourselves. We said, 'We're all Devo,' meaning there's a fatal flaw in human nature.
'Far greater minds and creative forces than Devo throughout history have made that point in novels, plays, even operas,' he added. 'We were just continuing their fine work.'
Early versions of Devo included various contributors on guitar and keyboards, including Mothersbaugh's brother Bob, Casale's brother Bob ('Bob 2'), and their friend Bob Lewis. Another Mothersbaugh brother, Jim, played drums until he opted out and was replaced by longtime member Alan Myers.
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Bob Mothersbaugh still performs alongside his brother Mark and Gerald Casale.
A new documentary on the band directed by Chris Smith (1999's 'American Movie'), called simply '
Younger generations of adventurous music fans have been discovering the band through the magic of the Internet, he said.
'Kids that weren't alive [when the band was a household name] have discovered us online and flipped out, maybe the way I flipped out when I saw an old black and white film of John Lee Hooker in 1956,' he said. 'It was scary and great and foreign and powerful.'
To underscore the band's alarmism, Mothersbaugh said, he created synthesizer parts that mirrored the screeching headache sounds of vintage TV commercials for pain relievers: 'Eeeh! Eeeh!' Besides the Dadaists, the group looked to other avant-garde art movements, such as the Futurists.
'We didn't agree with their politics,' said Mothersbaugh, who has created soundtracks for TV ('Pee-Wee's Playhouse,' 'Rugrats') and movies ('
'We felt the same way. We were looking to other places to find sounds and inspiration.'
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Devo's rocky relationship with the music industry, which never knew quite what to make of the band, is detailed in the documentary. The band's most recent release, 'Art Devo,' is a two-disc set that plumbs the depths of their early recorded material, before the debut album came out. It's raw, occasionally raunchy, and often deliberately abrasive.
Asked whether he wishes the band had done anything differently to maintain the commercial momentum of the early 1980s, Casale demurred.
'Hindsight is really worthless here,' he said. 'For every band, every artist, there's this dichotomy between art and commerce, and there's always gonna be problems with the label if they don't understand you, or they fail to deliver, or they fight your creative urges. It's a struggle, right?'
Last summer the band was
'I don't know what's going on in the world these days,' Mothersbaugh says in the spoken interlude that the band wrote more than 40 years ago. 'People just don't seem to care about anyone in America or anywhere else in the world. They're all just going for that big ice cream cone in the sky.'
'It's tongue-in-cheek,' Casale said, yet it's a tribute to the singers who meant the song's lyrics sincerely: 'Because it really does take a worried man, right?'
DEVO: 50 YEARS OF DE-EVOLUTION... CONTINUED!
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8 p.m. Friday at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, 2 Lansdowne St., Boston. Tickets $55 and up.
James Sullivan can be reached at
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