I lived in central Ohio for 15 years, so I should probably have a stronger take on DEVO than “I like them and they are cool.” Alas, I never took the deep dive into being a DEVOtee (that’s what their fans call themselves, right?). This documentary had me thinking I had the wrong idea the whole time and should have probably picked up their albums while flipping through the bins at Used Kids Records. Those radio station promo copies of AGNOSTIC FRONT’s “Cause for Alarm” and LEEWAY’s “Born to Expire” from WKCO for $2.50 apiece were more my speed at age 19, so “Q: Are We Not Men?” and “Duty Now for the Future” didn’t warrant a second look. Too bad for past me.
In my time in Ohio, I picked up a stray fact about DEVO here and there through breathing in the atmosphere. Their mascot is Booji Boy instead of Boogie Boy because they ran out of g in the font they were using. There’s a release called “Hardcore DEVO, Vol. 1” that has “the stuff you’ll like” if HC punk is more your speed. They did an Obama 2008 campaign event in Akron and made a version of his O logo wearing the flowerpot hat. I replied to each of these nuggets of information with a disaffected “oh, cool” and moved on with my life. Who cares what that one-hit wonder band did? So much for me being open-minded about music.
Even though I wrote them off as a novelty band for “Whip It,” at least I didn’t think that song was some kind of celebration of a certain kind of old-fashioned roughneck masculinity. That’s the apparent takeaway many people had from that song’s video on MTV. The “you’ve got the wrong idea” refrain comes up a lot during the documentary. (Just last month the Memories feature on my computer’s Photos app soundtracked a nice montage of my kid’s earliest years to “Beautiful World,” which is such a dreadful misreading of that song that I had to laugh.) They position themselves as, if not intellectuals or nerds, then people who know more than the average folks. Making a brand (or a band!) out of the idea of being “the smartest guys in the room” is dangerous territory. Worse still, positioning yourselves as the ones who decry the de-evolution of humanity means that you must have something special about yourself that makes you able to make that pronouncement, especially when you have a song titled “Mongoloid.” "Trust me, dude. We are the chosen ones and everyone else knows nothing..." (Or something like that.) The inherent disdain that comes along with thinking you’re so clever and above the fray of the general public’s tastes can result in a variety of outcomes. Thankfully, the members of DEVO are oddballs at heart and they channeled that disdain into a creative pursuit. The story of Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale meeting through mutual friends at Kent State bears this out. They were just weird guys that found each other moving in the same elliptical social orbits; they were not trying to start a band or “make it” or do anything like that.
The fact that they were university educated is just one part of what made them outliers in the music scene at the time. They leaned into their braininess, but their weirdness seems to have had a stronger pull on their collective vision of social critique. What I’m trying to say is that if they were any good at being public intellectuals, then they would have become pundits (ugh) or authors of general interest subject area books or even professors. As one of my professors further down I-71 once said, “if academics could write, then they’d have been novelists.” Just the same, it seems from this documentary that the members of DEVO did not have the constitution for punditry or other forms of public intellectualism. That’s a good thing, mind you! We’d rather have the music.
It’s clear they knew how to handle the limelight, if only from the many television appearances that are part of the documentary. They know how to play the media game. They’re media literate not because they are keeping up with the news (they were) but because they knew what was expected of bands on programs like American Bandstand or whatever. Dick Clark saying “Oh, now I know what kind of interview this is going to be” when they gave him an oblique response to a canned question is a perfect example of that. They were aware of their weirdness but it didn’t come off as a shtick; they are just how they are. They wanted you to feel as uncomfortable as they did about the whole spectacle.
One thing I really appreciated about the documentary was the lack of typical talking head features throughout its runtime. Yes, band members and managers and people in the DEVO universe do appear with their name and credit at the bottom of the screen. But, there are no critics, journalists, fans, or contemporaries in the mix. I’d imagine there is no shortage of people who fall into those categories who could talk about DEVO for days. Instead, what you get is just the people central to the project. Others’ views, such as those of Dick Clark, are present in archival format as part of an existing broadcast or media moment. Just as they did during their career, they presented themselves in this documentary fully on their own terms. Oh, and the early live footage is beyond belief. There are people who saw DEVO at a bar after their shift at Goodyear or Firestone in 1976. They likely wanted to hear someone covering “More Than a Feeling” or “Afternoon Delight” and instead they got “Jocko Homo” and “Mongoloid” played by the guys who were dedicated and desperate about spreading the message of de-evolution regardless of what anyone else wanted to hear.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY THESE REVIEWS:
No comments:
Post a Comment