Thanks, Weird Al.
One of Weird Al's most beloved songs is Dare to Be Stupid. It's a style parody of Devo, mostly pulling pieces from Oh No! It's Devo. It was possibly my favorite Weird Al song. This is not how I found Devo.
I knew Dare to Be Stupid was a parody of Devo, who I obviously knew for Whip It. But I didn't look any deeper. Then, after listening to The Essential Weird Al compilation album for years, I suddenly got curious about the beginning of the polka medley, Polkas on 45. For those who don't know, Weird Al has an almost-every-album tradition of one song being a polka medley of songs which were popular between an album and the previous. There's three exceptions: Bohemian Polka, a polka cover of Bohemian Rhapsody, which had re-entered cultural consciousness through Wayne's World; the Hot Rocks Polka, a medley of exclusively Rolling Stones songs from throughout their career, and Polkas on 45, which was the first polka medley and contained popular songs from all across the previous decades. It struck me as odd that the second song is the immensely famous Smoke on the Water, but the first song is something I'd never heard before that goes as follows:
They tell us that
We lost our tails
Evolving up
From little snails
I say it's all
Just wind in sails
Are we not men?
We are Devo
Are we not men?
D-E-V-O
When I looked up the songs that were in the medley, I recognized the name Devo. I thought the lyrics were interesting, discussing evolution in a bizarre way that somehow made sense while using the completely made up phrase "just wind in sails". This led me to watch the music video for Jocko Homo.
First time I watched this video, I thought "what the hell, this sucks". Then I listened to it again. Then I listened to it again. It got to a point where I was listening to this song every single day. It was such an off-putting song, with a weird time signature and a descending chromatic line and off-kilter chords and the call-and-response section. Something about it was captivating.
This led me to listen to Devo's first album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! I specifically remember listening to it while playing MineCraft, which should hopefully scare anyone older than the age of 30 reading this. I was mesmerized, and it soon became one of the only albums I owned at the time. I later watched Devo play Uncontrollable Urge on ABC'S Fridays, which then re-blew my mind, being one of the first times I had ever seen a recording of a live performance (long before I ever saw an actual live performance), and Devo was a unit as in-sync and intense as one of those factories you see on How It's Made. I have a fond memory of the first time I watched it at a local football game, and I spent the next few minutes just doing the weird synchronous hopping from the end of the performance. Not a cool look, but Devo wasn't a cool band. It was a band of weirdos who just wanted to entertain, and that was what I wanted to be.
I am very slow to try new things. After finding Q/A in high school, my next Devo album was New Traditionalists, which I didn't listen to until college. I finally listened to all of the first five albums later in college, I got into the Hardcore albums and Something for Everybody after college, and it wasn't until this year (2024) that I finally listened to Total Devo and beyond. The entire time, I also gradually researched Devo more and more as I became fascinated by their story, their ideals, and their presentation. So now we're here.
This part didn't give you any insight, I just wanted to write it down somewhere.