Devo - Are We Not Men?

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Were Devo punk? Who cares! Whether punk had come about or not Devo would have existed. Whether they would have had the success they did and the direction they took is more debatable. Lets say they on the fringe of punk like Magazine were.

With their strange uniforms and philosophy of devolution (return to the basic, the seminal and non virtuoso) Devo often suffered incomprehension. But the fact is they had some cracking tunes like Mongoloid & Jocko Homo.

The success was not confined to the US. Record deals on both sides of the Atlantic gave them hits in the UK. The big one for them came from Whip It in 1980 which was a hit on both sides of the pond. By then the rock elements of their music had been replaced by more modern electronic dance style. They had evolved as it were!

 Click to hear clip of 'Mongoloid' 

   
Formed in and guided by Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale, Devo hailed from Akron, Ohio. The idiot bastard offspring of Roxy Music and the collected sour grapes of the '70's, Devo were a bitter and caustic piece of science fiction; a fantasy distillation of a peculiarly American reality.

A debut single Mongoloid/Jocko Homo was issued on their own Booji Boy label (whence emanated the refrain Are we not men...We are Devo) and a trip to New York in Mid 1977 gave them virtually a reputation overnight and a certain David Bowie becoming entranced with them.

Devo's delivered their theory of devolution through their spectacular manipulation of image and images playing - along with their lyrical bizarreness - on the audience intrigue factor. It culminated with the release of a potent redefinition of The Stones Satisfaction in the US in Dec 1977 and in Britain by Stiff in April 1978. An album was recorded with Brain Eno Are We not Men - We are Devo.
Cloaking their music in the admittedly obscure ideology of Devolution (hence Devo) they were if nothing else pure provocation. Humourless closet reactionaries found them either fraudulent or else guilty of making fun of mankind. Devo in fact took themselves a lot less seriously. They were manipulators in more ways than one. Apart from the rockbiz, they also reflected and manipulated what they saw around them, which is suburban release. Devo reacted to a state of mind you could sense simply by reading the newspapers; the immutable, impersonal weight of a world out of control. Again a band well ahead of their time.

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Liberally stolen from and added to the NME Guide To Modern Music from 1978