The Brag

Devo
It’s A Beautiful World
By Alisdair Duncan

When Devo got their start, they freaked a lot of people out: five weird, hyper-literate guys from the middle of Ohio, dressing strangely, making arch synth pop music, and preaching the theory that mankind had to regress in order to move forward. Of course, like many things that were once strange and outsider-y, they are now an accepted and loved part of popular culture. Years later, founding member Jerry Casale still seems a little baffled by it all. “Well, you know, at the time you’re doing something, you never get rewarded as a pioneer,” he tells me. “Years later, though, people start to look back and go, ‘Oh yeah, we always thought what they were doing was really cutting edge’. That’s how culture works, how the shock of the new always works, but that’s okay. These days we’re not shocking anymore – we’re digested as part of pop culture, and people accept that de-evolution is real. They don’t think of it as being an artful pose we’re putting on, they don’t see it as shocking.”

Listening to Devo’s lyrics, which include gems like “the lucky ones are going to be the first to go”, the band’s attitude seems like one of healthy pessimism. I ask Casale if he agrees, and he laughs heartily. “Well, yeah, there’s definitely a dark side to Devo, because we have a very dim view of human nature,” he tells me. “It seems like the ugly part of human nature always wins out.” Within Devo’s worldview, however, there is room for a certain amount of humour – in shooting lyrical barbs at that ugly side of humanity, the band could even be said to celebrate it. “Sure, but I mean, what else are you going to do?” Casale answers. “If you couldn’t do that, if you couldn’t poke fun, you’d become either a homicidal maniac or a beaten-down zombie with no spirit. The dark side of humanity is grist for the mill. That’s not just the case with us – many artists in many mediums find themselves obsessed with the same themes that we do.”

Casale once said that Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, a dystopian comedy about a future America where everyone is really, really dumb, is the kind of film that Devo would make if they made movies. I’m curious as to whether he sees any other contemporary artists as carrying on the legacy of de-evolution. “We see a lot of things that we like,” he says. “I mean, in music, the bands mostly take Devo’s style, not really the content. Even the bands that have been very laudatory about Devo in the press, like LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip – what they like about Devo is more the stylistic details of music and composition and off-kilter lyrics, rather than the manifesto of the ideas behind the band, necessarily. We see it in a lot of places though. We love Banksy, we love Shepard Fairey, we’ve always loved Jeff Koons. We see the work of all those artists and more – because I’m sure I’m forgetting some – and in it we see a like-minded sensibility.”

Devo write such bright, hooky pop songs – ‘Beautiful World’, ‘Whip It’, ‘Girl You Want’, the list goes on – that many listeners never pause to consider how dark and messed-up the lyrics are. One surreal and hilarious example of this is Devo’s encounter, a few years ago, with the corporate entity known as Disney. “We did a project for Disney a few years back, where they wanted us to repurpose our songs for four- to eight-year-olds,” Casale says. “I went out and did some casting, found some kids between 11 and 13 in LA who could really sing and play, and we made up a band, Devo 2.0, and then Disney’s record company compiled a list of songs for us to play – they gave us a shortlist. We recorded them and then I shot video of the kids playing the songs, and had a friend create all kinds of computer graphics to go along with it, we got a whole live show together. When it was almost done, one of the executives thought to ask for a copy of the lyrics…”

Needless to say, there was a crisis. Tense phone calls were made, meetings were held, and a lot of money was thrown at a problem that Devo didn’t know even existed until the Disney executives sat down and read the words. “The first problem came with, ‘It’s a beautiful world for you, for you, for you, but not for me’ (‘Beautiful World’),” Casale explains. “The executives told us, ‘You can’t say that!’ I asked what we should say instead, and they suggested, ‘It’s a beautiful world for me too!’ The funniest one was ‘That’s Good’. I wrote that song in 1983, and there’s a verse that says ‘Life’s a bee without a buzz, it’s going great til you get stung’, which to me means that life surprises you when you least expect it. The executives demanded that I get rid of that whole verse, and I wondered how that could possibly be. These guys in suits, who were so enthralled with the notion of urban hip hop culture, said to me that the verse clearly means that life’s a bitch unless you’re getting high, and that you’re feeling really great about getting away with it until you get popped by the cops. I thought, ‘Wow. I didn’t realise that in 1983 I was anticipating the rise of Tupac Shakur.’”

Initially, Devo chose to embrace their collaboration with Disney and the rewriting of their songs to be performed by chirpy kids as de-evolution in action, but by the end, it got a bit weird – even for them. “The biggest surprise was when they wanted to take ‘The Uncontrollable Urge’ out of the program all together,” Casale says. “They told us, ‘There’s nothing in that song you can keep – we’re not about to start telling the four- to eight-year-old market about sex’. We told them we were surprised, once again, because there’s nothing directly about sex in that song. They told us that the fact that it’s undefined means it has to be about sex. We said, ‘Okay, we can’t just throw it out, what if we define it?’ They came back to us and said, ‘Okay, you can keep it if you rewrite the lyrics and re-record the song and make it about junk food’. So basically, Disney had us take this song that wasn’t really about anything and make it a song about junk food, because that was acceptable for pre-teens.”

With an Australian tour imminent, I get my questions back on track and ask Casale what we can expect from their next round of live shows, a tour they’re sharing with Glaswegian legends Simple Minds. “That’s where the fans get to see a real curiosity,” he says. “We’re a band that still physically plays everything and lugs a bunch of analogue synthesisers up on stage with them. You can expect things from all stages of our career, from songs that we wrote way back in the early days to recent songs from the Something For Everybody record. It’s a balanced selection from the beginning to the end and everything in between, with plenty of costume changed and video elements. The things people rightfully expect, and would be very angry if they didn’t get.”

With: Simple Minds, The Church
Where: Sydney Entertainment Centre / Wollongong WIN Entertainment Centre
When: Friday December 7 / Wednesday December 12
More: Also playing A Day On The Green at Bimbadgen Winery, Hunter Valley on Saturday December 8, with Simple Minds, The Church and Models