My parents used to play DEVO for me and my brother when we were little. Songs like ‘Peek-a-boo’ and ‘Working in a Coal Mine’ ended up on Birthday CDs, collections of songs we listened to over and over. But as much as I love listening to music, especially by DEVO, I do not care for music documentaries. I was resistant even to watching DEVO’s new movie, that is, until it started.
DEVO is more than just a group of authentic weirdos, they have a message. Their music is art and protest and prediction, and it turned out they were more right than even they wanted to be.
DEVO originated at Kent State University in Ohio. After the devastating shooting of 1970, where the National Guard fired on a group of students protesting the Draft and the Vietnam War, Mark Mothersbaugh approached Gerald Casale who was teaching drawing and design. They had both known some of the students who lost their lives protesting that May and they wanted to respond to the discord and violence they were beginning to see all around them. Mothersbaugh asked Casale, “what do potatoes mean to you?” His view was that potatoes are the vegetables of the proletariat, or the people’s root vegetable; they are not the cleanest or most beautiful, but everyone eats them.
Mothersbaugh and Casale were from working-class families, and likened themselves to potatoes. Potatoes have lots of eyes and see everything — and Casale and Mothersbaugh felt they saw everything too. They began to talk, and soon formed a philosophy and ideology. They reached out and got some of their siblings and other like-minded individuals involved in what started as a group of performance artists experimenting with sound, and evolved into a band that used music to spread their message of frustration with the American society they felt was falling apart.
Jordan Potter at Far Out Magazine writes, “The band’s devolutionist philosophy claims that the world is in a downward spiral of decadence, fueled by moral decline, mechanisation, and overconsumption. Ultimately, mankind will dictate its own demise” or de-evolution. Devolution, even. Hence, DEVO.
A lot of the band’s ideology was taken from Jocko-Homo Heavenbound, a religious Christian pamphlet by Reverend B.H. Shadduck, that emphasized the philosophy of de-evolution. Shadduck believed that evolution contradicted the religious idea that humanity fell from grace, because it meant that humans can improve over time, so there is no need for salvation. This philosophy became very successful between the 1920s and ’50s, despite the simultaneous rise of Darwinism. The pseudo-scientific pamphlet ended up in the hands of young Casale and Mothersbaugh, and according to Potter, “while DEVO obviously didn’t align with Shadduck’s regressive anti-evolution values, the late crackpot profoundly impacted their misanthropic views and artistic approach.”
Casale spoke about how DEVO started to transform their frustration and political ideology into something more tangible: they combined ideas from their backgrounds in visual art with music to create a multimedia piece of performance art. What started as experiments with sound — loud, lilting, punishing sound — soon became cohesive songs, which, the band realized, sounded good. So they started to perform.
They were a spectacle. Their movements robotic, their instruments electronic and deconstructed to their bare bones, their matching outfits…DEVO went through a few styles, the most iconic of which being their yellow jumpsuits and red “Energy Dome Hats,” costume pieces that both symbolized their futuristic vision of devolution and made them stand out against other bands of the time.
They made music that blended rock with electronic and experimental instruments, and it was, in a word, weird. It was really weird. The general public did not like them. According to the New York Times, their audiences were usually either indifferent or hostile. According to Casale, audiences had “been programmed for conformity and DEVO was walking in there with original material. It didn’t sound like anything, it didn’t look like anything that they already liked. And that’s just totally unacceptable.”
Despite a rocky start involving such setbacks as a lack of audience members and situations like being paid to leave a venue, DEVO eventually tweaked and figured itself out enough to slowly gain a following in the punk scene. Their ideology, neither anti-intellectual punk nor old-world, made them what Casale called “punk scientists” — angry young people rejecting society, but doing so from an informed, political perspective. As Jon Pareles, the chief pop music critic at The New York Times put it, “Devo’s ideas grew out of anger, political disillusionment, visual instincts, sonic ambitions, skepticism about rock and an absurdist sense of humor.”
DEVO also pioneered the music video. After all, they were multimedia artists. Back when they were starting out, Mothersbaugh and company had made art films incorporating their music as an avenue for expression. These films were important to the band’s success because in the 1980s, MTV was born. Suddenly, there was a 24-hour music service on television that played music, and if music was on television, it had to be an audiovisual experience. The program had 24 hours worth of time to fill with content, and DEVO had several, ready-made films — music videos — that MTV could use. Before music videos became mainstream and there were more options to choose from, DEVO was on MTV all the time, and the watching world could finally see them.
In some ways they were hypocrites, and they knew it: “‘We understood that dichotomy and that duplicity from the beginning,’ Casale said. ‘We were playing with it. You know, having your cake and eating it, too. Making fun of corporations and being one. You have to suck it up and be an adult about it.’”
While the corporate machine caught up with them eventually, they also fought hard to stay true to themselves. In the recent documentary, musician and producer Brian Eno talked about producing DEVO’s first album. He said that DEVO was the most uptight band he had worked with, never wanting to change anything, even if it had been David Bowie (who originally planned to produce them) who had done the mixing. They knew their sound and they did not want to compromise.
They were similarly unwilling to bend after their first album came out and they moved to a new record label. The executives at Warner Bros. Records pushed them to write hits, to cater to their audience. They were constantly fighting with the label, especially after their song ‘Whip It’ gained in popularity because of its radio air time, and later MTV music video. But giving the executives what they wanted as a part of the perpetual cycle of profit would be antithetical to the philosophy of DEVO — who kept making their strange sounds and experimental music in order to share their message.
Of course, things eventually fell off of the rails. Their weird and experimental sound got weirder and more experimental as they began to acquire the funding and equipment to mess around with it. Before they gained popularity, DEVO did its own fundraising, once even opening a graphic design company just long enough to raise funds for a music video/short film. Their instruments were deconstructed and clearly homemade. However, once they had the opportunity, they began to look at new ways to make sound, and that meant new equipment. Mothersbaugh stated, “toys do run away with you…We always cautioned about that, but there we were, including ourselves in the equation. We did say, ‘We’re all Devo.’ We didn’t exempt ourselves, and we proved it.’”
When we think about DEVO, we think that their ideology is a thing of the past. They saw the world a certain way, but things are different now, right? …Well, as Jon Pareles in The New York Times said, “Devo envisioned American culture evolving in the wrong directions, or devolving: dumbing down, losing individuality, succumbing to corporate imperatives and treating people as machines while anesthetizing itself with consumption. Those trends, to put it mildly, have not reversed.”
When DEVO uses one of their mottos, ‘mutate, don’t stagnate,’ it makes me wonder which we are doing, as Americans. We are the next generation – have we received DEVO’s message? Have we learned anything? Taking today’s political and social circumstances into account, have we escaped devolution? It is a question that haunted me as I tried to understand where I stood among conflicting philosophies of then and now. I know that ideological movements come in waves, but it really does seem like there exists a collective regression in today’s society. Yes, the Cold War and the Draft have come to an end, and there is a greater awareness of the shortcomings of government, but new issues have arisen. We now face climate change, artificial intelligence, the spread of misinformation and outright lies from our politicians, intense partisanship and political polarization, decreasing attention spans in people of all ages, and the perpetuation of consumerism through influencer culture. If we look at it through DEVO’s eyes, we’d be lucky if we had stagnated in the ’70s.
After watching the documentary and learning that there was a message behind the music, I wanted to soak up as much DEVO as possible. Maybe if I spent more time trying to see the world through DEVO’s eyes, I would be able to understand their philosophy well enough to make it my own. Maybe even try to make some change. So when I found out that they would be playing a show at Jones Beach on October 5th, 2025, I jumped at the chance to go.
Devo did not disappoint. They managed to blend nostalgia for the old days of yellow jumpsuits and Energy Dome Hats with the raw feeling of punk rockers who want the world to see what they see. Throughout the show, they kept changing outfits. Starting with suits, jackets that said “Reverse Evolution” on the back, they soon changed into their iconic yellow hazmat suits which Mothersbaugh then proceeded to rip off of himself and his bandmates while they played ‘Uncontrollable Urge.’ It was an interesting piece of performance art that some of the audience could take home with them. By the end, the band was in t-shirts and shorts, running around and rocking out.
They didn’t talk much about their message at the show, but they played some of the videos that inspired them back when they were starting, such as a clip from “Island of Lost Souls” and videos of monkeys in suits. There was a lot of monkey stuff. Humanity, they declared, did not evolve from apes. Apes devolved from humanity.
For the encore, they played their song ‘Freedom of Choice’ which was an incredible ending. The song’s refrain is “freedom of choice/ is what you got/ freedom from choice/ is what you want.”
Humans have evolved an ability to think for ourselves. Our large and developed frontal lobes allow for planning and foresight that our genetic ancestors never had. However, today, we have become reliant on devices like artificial intelligence to search for, sort, and synthesize information. Every day I see students asking ChatGPT for answers and outlines. And so few young people are politically involved. There are comparatively few at rallies and marches, and so many eligible voters just stay home. But when we stop using and developing our ability to think and make decisions for ourselves, the brain, like any other muscle, begins to atrophy. DEVO asks us: why give up a defining feature of humanity for momentary convenience? Relegating organization and reasoning to machines and autocrats does not bode well for humanity’s future cognitive abilities.
Thus, ending the show with ‘Freedom of Choice’ was a powerful message; we cannot let forces like the government or artificial intelligence think for us. We couldn’t in the 1970s during the Cold War as the government killed American citizens at home and destroyed lives overseas, and we cannot today as fascism rises and AI begins to take the place of human effort. We must retain that which makes us human, our freedom to choose.
DEVO is still asking us to fight the power. We have the freedom of choice. What will we do with it?
We now face climate change, artificial intelligence, the spread of misinformation and outright lies from our politicians, intense partisanship and political polarization, decreasing attention spans in people of all ages, and the perpetuation of consumerism through influencer culture. If we look at it through DEVO’s eyes, we’d be lucky if we had stagnated in the ’70s.