The Success/Intentionality Grid

    Few bands have ever had as strange a relationship with the concept of fame as Devo.

    Imagine, for a moment, that the relationship of a band to their own success can be represented by a point on a coordinate grid. The x-axis being the amount of success they are built to take, how close their sound is to the mainstream and how comfortable the band is with that sound. The y-axis, for the purposes of this mind experiment, is the intentionality of success – or, in rock snob terms, the "sell-out" factor.

    At one extreme of success grid you've got some bands that are determined outsiders. They are not built for fame and deliberately so. Big Black is the patron saint of this quadrant of our grid. Their dental drill sound put them at odds with mainstream musical tastes and Big Black wanted it that way. They chose to make being unpopular a moral imperative.
    Other bands are going to be unpopular or reject their own popularity for innate and unplanned reasons. These bands are either too weird and prickly for the limelight even if they wanted it (hence the inherent irony in the title of the Residents' "Commercial Album," for example) or, for reasons that precede intentionality, success proves too much for them and, like deep-sea creatures that lose their structural integrity when raised from the depths, they fall apart or explode (Nirvana, for example).

    Plotted at points opposite these quadrants are the bands built for success. This includes the boy bands, of course, but also, to a lesser degree, the walking clothing store ad that was the Sex Pistols. Whether ultimately successful or not, this quadrant is the land of the prefabricated group. Though the idea is almost innately distasteful, it would be rash to dismiss entire quadrant as a musical wasteland. Many of the finest groups to come out of the Motown label belong in this quadrant. These are formula groups, but sometimes you get a sweet formula.

    Finally, in the last quadrant, you've got bands and performers that, possibly to their own surprise, manage to take idiosyncratic act to mainstream success – I'm thinking, of the strange success of Bjork or Beck. How these people managed to gather Grammys or end up on the stage of the Academy Awards is most likely as much a mystery to the performers as it is to me.

    Devo is bizarre in that they wanted to simultaneously inhabit the entire grid at once.

A Capsule History of Devolution

    Devo's weirdness sprang from a legitimate place of anger.

    On May 4th, 1970, after four days of student protests, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a group of student protestors. Four students were killed. Nine were injured. The shooting closed the campus down for six weeks.
    In that six weeks of dead time, three Kent State art students tried to formulate a creative response that would capture the anger and confusion they felt over that moment. Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh, and Bob Lewis would end up creating the performance art/anti-rock outfit Devo. The name came from a book called The Beginning Was the End, in which a pseudo-scientific quack named Oscar Kiss Maerth put forth the theory that humans evolved from cannibalistic apes. They developed human intelligence by somehow absorbing the intellectual capacity of the brains they consumed.

    Though Devo's formation story sounds like the background to a typical bit of rock agit-prop, the boys from Devo started their project with a fatalistic twist. Devo was an act of rebellion. At their base, all Devo songs are about that most standard of modernist themes: alienation. The narrators of Devo's songs can't catch a break at work, can't get laid, don't understand even the most simple aspects of human relationships, and, in a sense, have ceased to be anything we'd like to think of as human. However, Devo also took as its central premise that all acts of rebellion are doomed to either extinction or assimilation. All statements, styles, sub-cultural stances, criticisms, no matter how antithetical they might seem to the mainstream culture, end up vanishing or becoming advertising jingles.

    Devo decided they wanted it both ways. They would be outsiders who got assimilated. Intensely creative, they would embrace all the trappings of pre-fab novelty bands (matching outfits, first name only stage personas). They would write songs using the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will as a vehicle to analyze heterosexual relationship dynamics; but they would do with a day-glo aesthetic that was relentlessly, single-mindedly about mass produced entertainment.
    Weird as the Residents, fake as a boy band, philosophically brutal, and giddy for corporatized success. They were created as pre-sold-out rebels.

    That was the theory anyway. It didn't always work out. At one of their first shows, they were assaulted by the audience and fled the stage under threats of bodily harm. When they finally got mainstream attention, Rolling Stone magazine, the veritable state-press of Sold Out Rebel Land, missed the joke and declared them fascists. They charted with a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" and the quirky "Whip It" (intended as an open letter to then President Jimmy Carter, who was losing badly in the polls against Reagan – Jimmy, Devo says get your shit together and fight!). Then Devo drifted into cult status.

    It seemed as if the boys were wrong. Maybe the mainstream couldn't swallow a band of art geeks named after cannibal apes, who sang tunes like the blatantly pornographic "I Need a Chick." Just maybe there was this little cult pocket of resistance that wouldn't die and could never be swallowed up.

Devo 2.0

    But, of course, it eventually it was.

    The self-titled "Devo 2.0," released by the DisneySound label this week, is twelve tracks of Devo's paranoid, neurotic, twitchy virus pop redone by a gang of disturbingly fresh-faced kids. Not just any kids. Devo 2.0 is comprised of those seemingly flawless children Disney fantasies are always populated with. The ones that seem to have come for some dystopian future where the insane eugenic fantasies of the mad mid-20th century came to pass so long ago that people no longer remember a time when the world wasn't populated solely by people who look like they came all-Aryan version of a WB teen show.

    Devo 2.0 consists of five children, but only three appear to have actually contributed to the album. Guitarist Nathan Norman and keyboardist Jackie Emerson do instrumental and back-up vocal chores. The rest of the instrumentation on the album is actually the work of Devo, the original, or 1.0, or whatever, who also produced the album at their Mutato Muzika studios. The sound is cleaner, more polished, and in many ways more traditionally rock than Devo's originals. The brittle, twangy sound of Devo's home built guitars as been replaced by a more full, reverberating, and traditional sound. The drumming is still precise enough to be mistaken for a drum machine, but with a more lush sound, it doesn't seem so starkly mechanical.
    The big change is Nicole Stoehr replacing Mark Motherbaugh's lead vocals. Motherbaugh's warbling, yelping performance, a sort of barely restrained manic delivery that gave Devo's music much of its jagged edge. Stoehr tackles Devo's songs with the calm confidence of an only-child performing in front of her family and certain that she's the star of the school play. She has very little of the fragile, crumbling persona of Motherbaugh. Though sometimes Stoehr works her voice and manages to channel this weird underage Shirley Manson vibe, especially in her version of "That's Good" (Stoehr pronounces "everybody" as "ev-ray-bod-day"). On other tracks she creates this flat expressiveness that I equate with Carla Bozulich, especially on her brilliant reinterpretation of "Whip It" and the excellent "Big Mess."

    The track list includes some eyebrow raisers – notably two classic odes to masturbation "Jerking Back and Forth" and "Uncontrollable Urge." They've been reworked into a song about dancing and one that, strangely, seems to be about binge eating and purging. I can only assume that Disney would rather have teenage girls developing eating disorders than playing find the man in the canoe.
    Other changes are obvious and, therefore, seem less intrusive. "Big Mess" has been stripped of drug connotations and firearm references. The gender reversed "Boy You Want" contains less sticky, tactile imagery (though still has a bit of a sexual edge thanks to Steohr's urgent delivery). "Beautiful World" loses it's "not for me" punchline.

    The album is not bad. Certainly worth purchasing if you are among that bizarre tribe of Devo cultist, like myself.

    Though, the album's quality seems beside the point.

Devolution and the Cool

    There's this thing called the "Mad Magazine Rule." It states that anything seen in an issue of Mad Magazine from 1952 to 1987 will, at some point, be done in earnest by somebody. And they'll make money doing it.

    With the release of this album, we need to create a similar "Devo Rule." There's nothing so odd, so offensive, so determinedly demented that Disney can't make money off it. Devo 2.0 is the proof that Devo's theory, spawned in the aftermath of the Kent State shooting, is correct. Mainstream culture can eat anything. Will and must eat everything. Somewhere, right now, a Disney executive is signing a deal for the rights to Throbbing Gristles back catalogue.

    Now I'm not one given to overstatement, but this is the end of all that's true and good. Devo 2.0 are not just the logical end of post-punk provocation. They aren't just the end of Devo. The squeaky clean face, the blonder than blonde hair, the prefect white teeth of Stoehr is the face of end of all resistance. When she sings the chorus of Devo's famous geek pride anthem, "we're through being cool" she's talking about the very impossibility of ever being cool again. And she's talking about all of us. We're the we there.

    No doubt several million of us will continue to "be cool." There will be arguments about authenticity. The sales figures for hair dyes in green and blue and burgundy will show no appreciable dip. People will proudly, defiantly claim superiority to "Hollywood" or "the mainstream" or, even better, the always suitable, "those people." But it will be lies. This week the entire Western world was through being cool. 'Cause Devo was completely right.