Had anyone else done it, you’d have to call them crass: Devo, flowerpot-hatted heroes of early ’80s New Wave, irony-fueled purveyors of squiggly, robotic grooves, are back. Now they’ve embraced the notion of corporate leadership, having employed focus group-style processing to narrow their 16-song list down to the 12 tracks that finally made it onto their new album Something for Everybody.
What saved Devo from getting lowest-common-denominator mush out of the process is a vast reserve of irony under high pressure—when they tap it, a gusher is born. It will hardly be news to Devo fans that their embrace of corporate musical guidance is in fact an “embrace.” The band’s name comes from the concept of “de-evolution,” the idea that humans are regressing rather than progressing. That philosophy (or more likely, observed truth) sets up a beautiful friction between earnestness and blackly acerbic humor in all things Devo.
The press release announcing Devo’s new tack put it this way: “&today everyone seems to agree De-evolution is real. That’s great news! We are pleased to be part of that new reality as we announce our partnership with Warner Bros. Records. Together with them and an award-winning advertising agency, we will now fulfill the promise of a journey that has delivered us smack into the 21st century. The new union will enable us to finally put the ‘Inc’ back into DEVO Inc.”
The pull of Devo’s music is like the need to work a loose tooth—it’s painful that they’re right about the sorry state of modern humanity, but it feels wonderful that they bother to point it out with such style. If you visit Devo’s website, you’ll find all sorts of mind-bending stuff. They even focus-grouped to find a new color for their old “energy domes” (the aforementioned flower pots, about which they say: “&the Dome collects energy that escapes from the crown of the human head and pushes it back into the Medula Oblongata for increased mental energy”). The videos of Devo’s odd spokesman asking focus group subjects about colors are fascinating—the scattershot free association bubbling up from inside the minds of participants is either particularly devastating proof of de-evolution or, on the other hand, proof of the triumphant illogic of humanity. Talking Heads is often labelled “the thinking man’s rock band,” but the infinite regression of mirror images sparked by Devo makes a strong case that they deserve that title even more.
It’s a weird thrill to give the new album a spin. The band ends up cranking into unlikely life an apocalyptic hoedown, a rave beneath the timeworn “abandon all hope” banner. Many a vintage group has resurfaced to milk diminishing profits from yesterday’s career with half-hearted retreads. Not Devo. Something for Everybody is, in short, a great album, as good as anything they’ve made since Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! or Freedom of Choice. Mark Mothersbaugh’s voice has somehow remained unaltered for decades, and he leads the proceedings with unexpected, vaulting melodies and a pile of unlikely hooks.
Devo were an unusual band in 1980—definitely futuristic, but sometimes dubbed emotionless for their heady and despersonalized ways. In old videos, they resemble animatronic figures, dressed alike and moving strangely. In the 30 years since, popular music hasn’t exactly morphed into their prophetic vision, but in many ways, they fit quite well into the current musical landscape. Similar aesthetics ripple through contemporary pop in unlikely places—Lady Gaga’s one-upsmanship in pure weirdness, the dulling depersonalization of pitch correction, the bloodlessly choregraphed overkill that prevails in much of contemporary popular music. But these days, the paunchy, much older members of Devo deliver something different than they did back then: they seem exceptional in their warts-and-all performances.
Newer performances, also available for watching on their site, reveal a group of guys who go through the old motions with a confident plainspokenness, aged emissaries who’ve returned to inhabit their own predictions of de-evolution. When the infectious strains of “What We Do” or “Fresh” hit your speakers, be prepared for a Devo onslaught that combines their old-school weird with a surprisingly powerful groove. It’s not exactly like anything else you’re likely hear in 2010, something like the B-52s doing the hokey-pokey with a chorus line of androids. But that bubbly entertainment is undermined to great effect when you listen closely to the lyrics. From “What We Do”: “Eating and breeding and pumping gas/ cheeseburger cheeseburger do it again,” and “What we do is what we do/ eeny meeny meeny meeny miny miny mo/ the lucky ones are gonna be the first to go.”
This is a band at the peak of its abilities, acerbic as ever and musically even more focused and dead on. And not a minute too soon: now that de-evolution is established fact, it may well be that only Devo can guide us to the next version of our bleak and focus-grouped future.
