2023-10-14 14:00:14
In the mid-1970s, five furious agitators from the industrial city of Akron (Ohio) sowed their robotic anthems, between punk and synth-wave. Today we are republishing their finest misdeeds.
Devo, in 1981. Photo Tannenbaum/DALLE APRF
Published on October 14, 2023 at 4:00 p.m.
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This summer, after a final tour, the costumed musicians of Devo announced that they were ending their career. To be honest, we didn’t really realize that they were back and we had rather gotten used to seeing one of the founding members, Mark Mothersbaugh, sign an impressive number of film scores (from Wes Anderson to Storm of giant meatballs !). The collections appearing this fall to celebrate their 50th anniversary – Art Devo et 50 Years of DeEvolution – rather provide an opportunity to go back in time to the berserk period, at the turn of the 70s and 80s, when David Bowie presented them as “the group of the future”, where the boss of Virgin invited them to welcome John Lydon, the singer of the Sex Pistols, and where they shook America with a mixture of Dadaist theories, crazy anthems and supercharged songs that shot at high speed from the punk years to those of synthetic new wave.
The general public discovered them in 1978 with their robotic and stamped recovery of I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction) of the Rolling Stones (applauded by Jagger), but, if we count correctly, the 50th anniversary takes us back much further, to 1973, to the time when the group from the charming industrial city of Akron, in Ohio , known for its tire factories (and a persistent “rotten egg smell”), is just a collective of student agitators. The two minds of the group, Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, met on the famous Kent State campus where demonstrations against the Vietnam War were bloodily repressed in May 1970. “Four dead in Ohio”, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young sing. Of the four victims of police shootings, two are friends of Jerry Casale.
Disembodied and dilapidated music
The group’s unbridled creativity is rooted in anger and bitterness. Since the human race seems to be turning its back on progress and heading towards barbarism, Devo appropriates the concept of De-Evolution. Darker and less romantic than the revolution. As a soundtrack to its ideas, the quartet imagines disembodied and dilapidated music that Mark Mothersbaugh recently described in the columns of Guardian From london : “The equivalent of the sounds you hear on TV while a reporter tells you that American planes are dropping bombs on the Vietnamese jungle. »
From their first appearances on stage, the four cheerful guys from Devo, not so happy after all, set a course for provocation and deliver performances that are as much free theater as they are rock’n’roll. They play as the opening act for Sun Ra or as a curtain-raiser for a film by John Waters, a distinguished trash filmmaker with whom they feel an affinity (to introduce themselves on the poster, they write “can we go lower? »). They all dress in the same plastic radioactive factory suits and rarely go out without their masks. They claim that there is nothing to distinguish them from one another, not even their shoe size, humans find “pompous” and say they descend from a line of brain-eating monkeys.
In the great years of FM rock, they entered into dissidence, derided the stars and did nothing to please. Quite the contrary. Their sounds are strident and their words abrasive. They sometimes play their first anthem for more than twenty minutes, Jocko Homo, who endlessly repeat their mantra: Are we not men ? – We are Devo. « La haine, on connaît, said Jerry Casale. The public upset us, they took pity on us or they outright wanted to kill us. We really shook people off their hinges. We were attacked on stage, we were forced to stop playing, our sound was cut off… One of the most glorious episodes of our debut was the day we were offered 50 dollars to quit. » For hardcore fans and the truly curious, the Futurismo label has compiled, with the group, some highlights from this period in the box set Art Devo 1973-1977.
An unparalleled masterpiece
The determination with which they courted David Bowie and Iggy Pop when they came to play in Cleveland in 1977 quickly showed that the avant-garde was not Devo’s only playground. They sympathized with Blondie and were easily noticed by Bowie, who announced that he would produce their first album in Tokyo. Finally, the singer disappears into the Berlin nights and it is Brian Eno who signs the production of the record. The ex-Roxy Music musician is at the height of his reputation as a cerebral rock guru, and the comet he forms with Devo and the Talking Heads is for him the ultimate in modernity. In the following years, Devo would sign some irresistible hits of synthetic pop, the scathing Whip It and the resumption of Working in a Coal Mine by Lee Dorsey, but their debut album remains their unrivaled masterpiece. Conceived, it seems, in a euphoric atmosphere. “Eno, Bowie, Dieter Moebius of Cluster, and Hoger Czukay all jammed on our songs, disait Mothersbaugh. Somewhere there is a tape of these recordings. »
50 Years of De-Evolution, 2 LP (coffret 4 LP en import) Rhino/Warner.
Art Devo, 1973-19773 LP Futurism.
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