252. Devo, "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!"

 


Listening back to this for the first time in many years, I was struck by how much this album reminded me of Gang of Four's Entertainment, which came out the following year.  Both are - here comes the rock critic word - angular, kind of herky-jerky, with undeniably weird vocals and a slyly critical take on modern mores (ok, Entertainment isn't sly about its critique, but you get my point).  I feel like before Devo was the "Whip It" Devo, the flowerpot hats Devo, they were a post-punk band with a lot of interesting musical ideas but not yet a thing.

Devo started up in Akron, Ohio in the mid-70's and were probably too advanced for the public at that time.  They really came into bloom later during the 80's when irony was invented, but that's beyond the scope of this entry.  Anyway, their demo found its way to David Bowie and (of course) Brian Eno, who brought the band to Cologne, West Germany to record this record.  In a year when five of the top 100 songs were recorded by one or more of the Gibbs brothers, this album spectacularly failed to launch, reaching only #78, but wow, it is so different from what was big in 1978 that it doesn't even seem like the same concept of music, much less the same genre.

The first song, "Uncontrollable Urge," could almost be punk until Mark Mothersbaugh's odd, strained vocals kick in.  Then it just kind of gets stranger - at least to 1978's ears - as it goes along.  "Jocko Homo" is about the idea of devolution that gave the band its name, the concept that humans are done evolving and are now going backwards:

They tell us that
We lost our tails
Evolving up
From little snails
I say it's all
Just wind in sails

Are we not men?
We are Devo
Are we not men?
D-E-V-O
We're pinheads now
We are not whole
We're pinheads all
Jocko Homo

"How Deep Is Your Love" it's not.  "Space Junk" is ostensibly a straightforward story of debris falling from the sky all over the world but really speaks to the anxieties of the time, that technology had slipped out of our control and would turn on us.  There's also a bunch of sexual references that I'm sure are laden with meaning but which I don't really have time to unpack.  Like in "Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')," Mark sings "I think I missed the/Hole, la/Hole, la/Hole, laaaa/She said sloppy."  Just a juvenile sex joke, or an insightful commentary on contemporary gender mores? Who knows.  There's also a cover of the Stones' "Satisfaction" that strips any joy and licentiousness from the original and renders it an ice-cold commentary on the emptiness of consumer culture.  Pretty good trick.

[A PROGRAMMING NOTE: We will be out for Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday, back on Monday with number 251, which is coincidentally the halfway point!]

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Oh, definitely.

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