I’ll always remember the primary time I noticed Devo. It was October 14, 1978, and my faculty roommates and I have been watching “Saturday Evening Reside.” The band, which I had by no means heard of (I might guess that was true of 98 p.c of the individuals watching the present), got here on of their yellow jumpsuits, stiff and mechanical, swiveling like offended androids as they carried out their brutalist robo model of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” When the tune ended, one of many band members shot up his hand in what appeared form of like a Hitler salute. (It wasn’t, nevertheless it was shut sufficient.) At this level, the punk revolution was previous information, and the brand new wave was in full swing. I had eaten up the apocalyptic barbed anarchy of the Intercourse Pistols; I reveled within the Ramones, the Conflict, Speaking Heads, you identify it. However I’m not remotely exaggerating after I say that Devo doing “Satisfaction” on “SNL” stays the one musical efficiency I’ve ever seen that scared me. They gave me the shivers.

By the point the band got here again for its second quantity, “Jocko Homo,” I’d steeled myself and was a bit extra prepared for them. But the sight of Mark Mothersbaugh yelping “We’re pinheads now, we’re not entire/”We’re pinheads all, Jocko Homo,” then wriggling out of his jumpsuit as if he have been in some manic state of regression was nonetheless…intimidating. I had no thought, on the time, what Devo was about, however all I might suppose was: Is that this the music of the long run? The mere risk appeared terrifying.

To the hundreds of thousands of Devo followers who got here to know the band by “Whip It,” the propulsive and perverse, outrageously hooky anthem of proactive self-help that grew to become a crossover hit for them when it was launched two years later (propelled by a music video that winked on the tune’s sadomasochistic subtext), my story in all probability sounds a bit foolish. How might anybody be terrified of Devo? Within the late ’70s and early ’80s, the band was a number of issues — performance-art showmen, pioneers of music video, satirical absurdists with a giant message (that American society wasn’t progressing — it was devolving), and, not so by the way, scorching musicians who created their very own model of inside-out rock ‘n’ roll. As soon as you bought onto their wavelength, what all this added as much as was a really bizarre and important type of enjoyable.

Chris Smith’s “Devo” is a documentary that’s each bit as enjoyable as its topic. For Devo followers, it’s 90 minutes of irresistible pop historical past and dazzlingly edited surrealist audio-visual sweet. Watching the movie, although, I might nonetheless see what I discovered a bit ominous about Devo in 1978. The band wasn’t simply taking part in their songs or proselytizing about “de-evolution.” They projected a picture of the place we have been going. Almost 50 years later, it seems that they have been proper, however you truly didn’t want the final 50 years to see that. Listening to Devo, consuming in what they have been about, you knew in your bones that they have been proper. They crafted songs that have been like punk sweet of their percussive catchiness, but they’d seen the long run, and it wasn’t fairly.

Each music documentary traces how the artists it’s about acquired began. However within the case of Devo, that story is notably mysterious and engaging. As a result of this was a band with the strangest roots ever, and a band that genuinely developed, like a creature crawling out of the water to stroll with out understanding what it was but. Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, the founding leaders of Devo, have been born in 1950 and 1948, and the swamp they emerged from was the grubby sq. working-class metropolis of Akron, Ohio. The 2 met at Kent State College and have been proper there in the course of the Could 4, 1970, protest in opposition to the Vietnam Struggle that resulted in 4 college students being shot and killed by Nationwide Guard troops, with different college students wounded.

This, in fact, grew to become a tragic legend within the historical past of the counterculture, and it exerted a profound affect on Mothersbaugh and Casale. “There could be no Devo with out Kent State,” says Motherbaugh within the movie. He and Casale, in laying out the historical past of the band, keep in mind themselves as leftist idealists, but on the day of the bloodbath that idealism got here crashing down. It was then that they started to evolve their philosophy of what was actually occurring in America.

They drew on a crazed welter of inspirations, lots of them a long time previous: the Dada artwork motion of the early twentieth century; a rabble-rousing pamphlet from 1933 that featured the phrases “Jocko Homo” and pictures of monkeys and the satan emblazoned, on his chest, with the phrase “de-evolution”; the postmodern prankishness of Andy Warhol; and, lastly, the second that introduced all of it collectively, once they noticed the 1932 science-fiction horror movie “Island of Misplaced Souls,” during which Charles Laughton performed a mad scientist making an attempt to show animals into people, a situation that provides rise to the mythic phrase (uttered by Bela Lugosi’s Sayer of the Regulation), “Are we not males?”

Out of this mad mélange, Mothersbaugh and Casale developed the concept — a form of funhouse-mirror reversal of the Idea of Evolution — that mankind was now devolving, turning into much less human and extra apelike. Beginning in 1973, when Devo was fashioned, they started a course of, which might take just a few years to nail down and get proper, of expressing this concepts by a madcap musical and visible idiom. They didn’t imply any of it actually, in fact (although a part of the enjoyable of Devo is that they pretended they did). The entire we’re-devolving factor was, quite, a grand metaphor. But what was it a metaphor for? That is one place the place I feel the documentary falls a bit brief — in elucidating what it was, precisely, that Devo was making an attempt to say.

If you happen to had by no means heard of Devo and watched this documentary, you would possibly suppose the band’s message was a reasonably commonplace progressive critique of American society. The way in which Mothersbaugh and Casale put it within the movie, within the ’50s and ’60s America saved promising a world of progress — of better social justice, of higher dwelling for everybody, and all of the shiny propaganda of the post-WWII world. However Mothersbaugh and Casale, rising up within the blah coronary heart of the Midwest, appeared round them within the ’70s and noticed a squalid, cheesy, advertising-drenched, slouching-toward-oblivion society that wasn’t dwelling as much as the dream of these earlier a long time. If something, it was slowly however absolutely spiraling down.

Honest sufficient. But that’s primarily the critique of America that had powered the hippie counterculture. The one line within the film that begins to counsel what Devo was truly about is when Mothersbaugh, recalling the Kent State protest and taking pictures, tosses off the statement, “One factor we discovered from that’s that revolt is out of date.”

Whoa! That’s fairly an announcement. It’s not an announcement that squared with progressive considering again then; it’s not an announcement that squares with progressive considering now. For if revolt grew to become far much less organized after the ’60s, it additionally grew to become wired into the material of middle-class identification — one would possibly say middle-class privilege. The Conflict and different bands (together with heavy-metal ones) offered revolt. The indie rock of the ’80s offered revolt. Social media now sells revolt.

What Devo was saying, fairly radically, is that “revolt” in opposition to The System had develop into out of date as a result of “revolt” was now a part of The System. It was another narcotizing means of creating individuals numb by making them be ok with themselves. And what, within the eyes of Devo, had changed — had, certainly, consumed — revolt? In a phrase, conformity. (That’s one purpose that revolt was out of date: It was about syncing your “protest” consciousness to that of everybody else.) What Devo have been saying is that even “progressive” individuals have been now dwelling in a world of cookie-cutter orthodoxy, of obedience, the place there may very well be no counterculture as a result of the tradition at massive had already eaten it.

Devo, with their jump-suited stage antics and robotic singing, have been saying that America — even rock ‘n’ roll — was turning into a spot of spud-like phantasm that prolonged from the buyer tradition to common tradition to political tradition (which was now simply one other type of client tradition). The band’s actual theme wasn’t “de-evolution.” It was fascism. And so they had the wit to make themselves an instance of it. Even their music, with its concrete beats and mock directives, sounded fascist. After they grew to become a mainstream success with “Whip It,” they toyed with the notion that the High 40 was fascist. However within the new America, descended from the ’50s, fascism would now be offered with a beat and a smile.

“Devo,” in its means, preserves the playfulness of Devo by not getting too critical about any of this. As an alternative, the movie traces the rocky highway on which this unlikeliest of hit bands grew to become a hit. It exhibits us how they honed the avant-garde noodlings of their stage present, initially introduced to hostile crowds in an Akron rock membership, right into a catchy and disciplined multi-media expertise. And whereas they weren’t the primary band to do movies (that will be the Beatles), they might have been the primary to show music video right into a Dada satirical artwork type; we see the small movies they made with director Chuck Statler for “Jocko Homo” and different tracks, and although primitive at occasions, they’ve misplaced none of their scabrous provocation.

We hear about how Devo first made their mark by turning into a part of the prolonged punk household at CBGB, the place the Useless Boys welcomed them by beating them up, and the place, beneath the affect of the Ramones, they realized that their songs sounded higher when performed quicker. There have been celebrities within the viewers (like Jack Nicholson), and Mothersbaugh tells a fantastic story about how after a efficiency of “Uncontrollable Urge,” John Lennon got here as much as him and sang proper into his face, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-YEAH!,” mimicking the tune’s “She Loves You”-in-the-loony-bin hook. David Bowie took an interest within the band in 1976, and mentioned he wished to provide them, however he didn’t observe by, perhaps as a result of he was in the midst of his personal misplaced weekend. Their first album was finally produced by Brian Eno, who did a masterful job of coaxing out their subversive catchiness.

“Devo” touches on the intensive historical past of Devo’s dangerous file offers, beginning with the one they struck with Warner Bros., which wound up entangled in a lawsuit when Richard Branson, the mogul of Virgin, tried to poach them, and the band, having no supervisor, went alongside. Most arrestingly, although, the movie celebrates, with its personal visible slyness, how Devo expressed themselves in an aggressive explosion of images: the rubber masks of a chimpanzee and Booji Boy (a form of overgrown ’50s child who represented the ironic innocence on the coronary heart of the New Regime); the plastic JFK-hair helmets; the shiny purple energy-dome hats — which, by the way, got out as a present to each viewers member on the movie’s Sundance premiere, a little bit of swag that my faculty mates and I might have known as “actual devo” (and no, that wasn’t a praise).

The movie reminds you simply what number of nice songs that they had, like “Come Again Jonee” and “That’s Good” and “Lovely World,” a gripping goose-step anthem that haunts you with its irony. The band pale out, within the mid-’80s, after its sixth album (although they finally continued to tour — one thing the film ought to have made extra of a degree of mentioning). However their second handed solely as a result of their mission was performed. They’d given us the message. And we had heard it and danced to it. There was nothing to do now however sit again and watch the world devolve.