It's DEVOlution Baby!

"It was twenty years ago today, that DEVO forgot how to play." Jerry Casale chooses a suitably wry pop cultural reference to explain what amounts to one hell of a hiatus – it's been exactly two decades since one of the original New Wave bands released their last studio album, Smooth Noodle Maps.

On the eve of their latest release, Something For Everybody, Casale is at his sardonic finest ('How are you today Jerry?' "I'm alive and functioning") and keen to point out that they've never really gone away. Which is true.

Sporadic live appearances, a Disney project called DEVO 2.0 and an outing under the guise of Jihad Jerry and the Evildoers have kept things nicely ticking over. The latter act was a sublime example of the facetious cynicism that is DEVO's hallmark, Jerry being an Iranian activist declaring 'war on stupidity' – the joke didn't go down so well. "To me it was supremely humorous but we lived in a time when there was zero sense of humour,” says Casale. “Jihad did not get the love; Jihad did not get the love."

The love, however, appears to be back for the group formed at art school in Akron, Ohio in 1972. The musical styles have changed over the years, from punk, to art-rock and synth-pop, but the surrealism, satirical social commentary and iconic imagery employed by the band remains intact. In other words, the message remains the same: mankind is regressing, de-evolving.

Recently, Casale's bandmate Mark Mothersbaugh said, "Now if you ask people if de-evolution is real they understand there was something to what we were saying. It's not the kind of thing you want to see proven right. But it makes it easier to talk about." Casale concurs with that sentiment. "It's kind of like admitting that global warming exists. Once you've done that you can go forward from there, knowing what the truth is. We knew we were right all along but ever since commercial jetliners flew into the World Trade Centre and the whole western world saw the tail wagging the dog, the man in the cave tweaking the west, at that point the masses of people began to understand that de-evolution was real."

Something For Everybody, produced by Greg Kurstin (The Bird & The Bee), had something of a curious gestation process. Advertising agency, Mother LA, conducted a study on the website www.clubdevo.com, enlisting the opinions of any member on a variety of creative decisions. Colour selection (the infamous 'Energy Domes' are now blue), remixes, and even which tracks made the final cut were all achieved with outside opinion. "We're pretty self-effacing and realise the irony of guys our age making a new record,” Casale confesses. “The way we went about it was, since nothing's really funny anymore, by the same token everything is funny. That's why we hired an advertising agency. What could be more ridiculous or DEVO than that?

"Look at where we're at,” he elaborates – “if we just limit that examination to music, for instance. First of all, nobody even wants to pay for music, the role it plays culturally has been trivialised. There's more music coming out than anyone could ever discover or shake a fist at, like a thousand CDs a month or whatever it is. In that landscape, with the implosion of the record business as we knew it, how do you even release music, what do you do in corporate society when you want to put out creative content? We decided that, in that world, marketing is everything, the beginning and the end. How else do you know if a band has put out music, how else would you even possibly care?"

So, the current incarnation of DEVO has been 'focus-grouped'. This simultaneously hilarious yet somewhat depressing notion is precisely what the band was aiming for. Casale leaves us with the notion that, in this new approach and the embracing of outside opinion, DEVO themselves are actually evolving. "To use a phrase that someone in the NME wrote in 1981: 'DEVO – These guys don't play ball'," he recalls. "In other words we don't get with the programme. We were very pure and hermetically sealed. We just did what we did and then handed it in autonomously like a class assignment where we didn't pay any attention to the rules. There was substance to what we did, it wasn't just guys with skinny ties like The Knack, and so we became 'iconic' on some level. There are a lot of people that know DEVO, or think they do, or use DEVO lingo or slogans who never bought a record, or even saw us live, but they want the red hat."

---

GUEST QUESTIONS: The music community asks....

Scott McCloud (Girls Against Boys/Paramount Styles)
Q. Do you think the future already happened, and if so when was it? 
A: Very funny and astute! That's what our song Later Is Now refers to on the new album. I think when the planes hit the Trade Towers the word was made flesh.

Yoni Wolf (WHY?) 
Q. We have a mutual friend, Chuck Statler, who did most of DEVO's early videos. How did you hook up with him and what was your process for filming? 
A. I befriended Chuck in Kent State University. There was a guy there named Richard Myers who created a film department out of nothing. He was a real zealot, and a really great guy. Chuck came to the University solely to be in Richard Myers' classes and shoot film. He had a 16mm camera and I started talking to him about what I was doing with Mark and he wanted to be involved. So we collaborated together and I eventually learned enough technically, to know exactly what I was doing myself.

Buck 65 
Q. I've always been fascinated with the video for Whip It. It's my favorite of all time! I wonder where that came from and how involved the band was in the direction of it? 
A: I directed all of Devo's videos. The idea for Whip It came from a men's girlie magazine that featured an article about a dude ranch in Arizona where the husband owner whipped off his wife's clothes in the corral to entertain the guests at the ranch. Seemed so perverted and All-American at the same time, so we used it as inspiration.

Kim Thayill (Soundgarden) 
Q. Why do you think Soundgarden's cover of Girl U Want is so slow? 
A. I assumed it was because they were doing heroin but I found out that wasn't true.