The Future, One More Time

05/16/2000 2:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
David Weiss

Pressing play on the new large-scale release from Devo, Pioneers Who Got Scalped (An Anthology), doesn't seem like an act that should require much preparation. But as the tuneage gets underway and your brain quickly finds itself knee-deep in the multi-level contradictions that define this very strange and very important band out of Akron, Ohio, you may wonder if you really were ready for this after all.

All it usually takes to get jumbled up in Devo's unworld is one or two songs. Pioneers is four sides of the stuff, plus intense packaging that extends the group's visual mission. The problems with being a Devo fan, or denouncer, come rushing back with this collection of their standards and rarities. Are you being enlightened or annoyed? Are you inspired or aghast? Are they with you or against you?

You might at least expect that the members of Devo--those five guys who rolled electronics, punk, pop, rock past, and rock future into one bittersweet pill--would be proud of this new collection, which demonstrates their prescience to a new generation. But pride isn't quite the word. "This was not our idea," Devo co-founder Jerry Casale says of Rhino Records' release of Pioneers. "We were informed that this was what they were going to do, whether we liked it or not. So I asked if I could be involved at least in its presentation, because if it was going to be, it would be better if we put some of our stamp on it. I don't know why now, and I would have done it differently. But I love the package."

Casale's more miffed about the track sequence and selection than anything, but adherents to the theory of de-evolution will find plenty to be happy about. Stacked with a 52-page booklet, pics from the personal archives of Casale and fellow Devo founder Mark Mothersbaugh, and other assorted visual and audio collectibles spanning the band's 20-year career (dig their cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like A Hole"), Pioneers is definitely nothing to be ashamed of.

While Devo took on every conceivable type of establishment with groundbreaking hits like "Whip It," "Freedom Of Choice," and "Beautiful World," there were some mortal traps that even they couldn't outwit. It can be shocking to hear Casale talk about one of the world's most strategy-minded rock bands ever getting screwed out of money by the music industry, so cover your eyes if you can't handle the truth.

"The tables always turn," Casale admits. "Devo were record business victims. The guys [on the Pioneers cover] throwing tomahawks are businessmen--pseudo-hippies in suits, managers of business affairs, all the people that made dirty deals with us, or made good deals that they didn't keep. It's fantastic: They have a million ways of playing 'hide the sausage,' only it's 'hide the money.' It's like it disappears, and the creative accounting is notorious. There's a million ways they took it from you. After all your hard work, it just felt bad."

But why dwell on the negative? So Devo were only human, after all, but humans were actually what they were most fascinated with. They had a lot to say about society's state of decay, and it turned out that there were a lot of people waiting to hear it. "We tapped into an alternative world that spoke to things that no one else was addressing," says Casale. "We got people thinking and we got them energized. We were known for our irony and our wit, and really strong visual icons that burned right into your brain. People that felt like they were being left out or didn't fit in or were thinking things that nobody was legitimizing--we legitimized them. So we talked about ideas, and we talked about cultural politics and scientific advances. We made jokes. We attacked idiots like Ronald Reagan."

Casale and Mothersbaugh believe that when they started the band in 1972, they were guided by a powerful unseen force that would keep them out of corporate boardrooms forever. "Nobody does a job like running a marathon or forming a band or f--king in porno films if they could sit behind a desk and be a respected member of the community," Casale insists. "I think they find they're driven--they gotta do what they gotta do. It would be far worse for them to not do it. It's like a genetic imperative."

Let's not forget that at the heart of the rhetoric was Devo's ability to make good songs, with hooks that stuck somewhere in your body and cut an internal path to your mind. Together with Jerry's brother Bob, Mark's brother--Bob--and drummer Alan Myers, Casale and Mothersbaugh constructed the songs that would load albums like Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo, Duty Now For The Future, Freedom Of Choice, and New Traditionalists with revolutionary sounds.

"We showed people another way of putting parts together," says Casale. "We had interesting compositions and, the way the sounds were layered, it's like learning a mathematical trick half the time. I think we triggered creativity, and certainly the lyrics were subject matter that was other than sex and drugs. We showed people that there was a different way to be sexy, by being super-organized and working as a team for an idea, beyond the cult of personality. That's what people liked when they saw Devo--the energy, the intensity, the precision."

Anyone who ever saw Devo, or even saw pictures of Devo, had to be taken by the united front the band presented: five guys that were all almost exactly the same height and weight (and allegedly shoe size as well). A crucial component of their success was the way they conveyed the sense that they were a unified fighting force. While the members had to be on approximately the same wavelength just to get started, there was something else that cemented that sense of cohesiveness.

"Lots of f--king hard work," Casale explains. "Absolutely. That took a lot of practice. It really was like that for a long time, and then it just looked like that." When asked what made it break down, Casale gives an honest answer by questioning the question. "It's human nature, isn't it? Why does a corporation start off sometimes doing really good stuff, providing good services, and then become a parody of itself? Watch any artist. Why do they do all their best work in the first couple of years, and by the time they're getting millions of dollars it's schlock?"

One can only imagine what would have happened if Devo had been born today, and not back in the '70s when there was no Internet to speak of. Casale himself is predictably a big e-fan, seeing the Web as humanity at its highest and lowest order. "It is the fourth dimension," he says. "It's an exponential boost to hucksterism and scams. It is completely now an unfettered readout on the state of human consciousness, so you see it in all of its ugly, bizarre, muddled glory untamed by a gatekeeper.

"If a Devo of today were to be around, it could certainly use the Internet completely and very sophisticatedly. Absolutely that's what they'd be doing. They'd be sending out viral music--music that multiplied itself and got into every system."

Naturally, Casale would never do anything like that himself. He's a little more respectable these days, directing TV commercials and music videos for the likes of the Foo Fighters and Silverchair, while his cohort Mark Mothersbaugh is a much-in-demand commercial sound designer. But even though they never quite took over the world, today Casale feels Devo can take a good helping of credit for not only attacking cultural institutions, but also causing a big shift in the way people think about them.

"I think we deconstructed popular mythology, so we get associated with the stuff that is now taken for granted," he notes. "The idea of legitimacy of authority--like there's a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans; that organized religion and televangelism is good; that disinformation is now the way of the future. If you watch programs like E! True Hollywood Stories, it's like, so much disinformation and insanity. Jerry Springer-like spuds--subhumans taking over. They did [take over], and we were right, and now it's not funny."