{"id":395,"date":"2007-03-29T21:48:34","date_gmt":"2007-03-30T01:48:34","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2012-03-16T08:39:04","modified_gmt":"2012-03-16T12:39:04","slug":"music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/music\/","title":{"rendered":"Music That&#8217;s Better with the Sound Turned Off: Devo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/FUJXms4vWa0?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nThe great thing about <strong>Devo<\/strong> was that you didn&#8217;t have to listen to their music to love them. Their appearance on <em>Saturday Night Live<\/em>, where they performed &#8220;Satisfaction&#8221; and &#8220;Jocko Homo&#8221;, complete with the coordinated robot moves, the Booji Boy routine, the yellow HazMat jumpsuits, and a fuzz box mounted directly on one of the guitar players&#8217; guitar, was <strong>the atom bomb of the rock &#8216;n roll age<\/strong> as we knew it. With that appearance, the release of their album, and their spectacular, absurd videos, they launched the eventual MTV\/hip-hop-era attack on the value of Brill Building-based song structure, the blues tradition in rock, and perhaps music itself.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Did anyone really listen to a Devo song for the song itself?<\/strong> Sure they had some catchy songs and put a minimalist, repetitive spin on the classics, but without the arch theories and choreographed stage and video presentations what are they but <strong>Neil Young&#8217;s <em>Trans<\/em><\/strong>? Lord knows a generation of rock nerds has wasted time trying to defend the merits of that album the way that generation&#8217;s rock nerd big brothers wasted time defending the merits of <strong>The Beach Boys&#8217; <em>Love You<\/em><\/strong> album, but that&#8217;s neither here nor there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Try turning down the volume on a Devo video<\/strong> someday &#8211; turn it all the way down &#8211; and tell me if the images onscreen aren&#8217;t just as powerful and the song isn&#8217;t just as good. Try listening to a Devo record with the volume turned all the way down. Just look at the album cover and read an old interview with Mark Mothersbaugh about the philosophy of de-evolution. The album is just as good as if you had it cranked up.<\/p>\n<p><em>Turn down the sound to the following video before watching, and see if you can calculate how little enjoyment you lose.<\/em><br \/><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CvcuaJy9OwI?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nIn the decades that would follow the appearance of Devo, the music itself would become secondary, then tertiary to the marketing campaign, the video, the overall <em>buzz<\/em>. Justin Timberlake puts out a new album, pop culture feature stories and cover shots are booked, the little girls understand, old white guys at laptops hammer out praise using &#8217;00s hipster lingo, and JT videotapes himself live at the GRAMMYS! This is <strong>the onanistic world Devo imagined<\/strong> and helped usher in. They accepted our necessary de-evolution and aided nature in having her way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The great thing about Devo was that you didn&#8217;t have to listen to their music to love them. Their appearance on Saturday Night Live, where they performed &#8220;Satisfaction&#8221; and &#8220;Jocko Homo&#8221;, complete with the coordinated robot moves, the Booji Boy routine, the yellow HazMat jumpsuits, and a fuzz box mounted directly on one of the <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/music\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[109,604],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}