New Musick II
Devo?
Devo/Devoid/void/devoted/devolution: Savage attempts a discrete distillation. Devout. Things are not as they seem, nor as they have been reported… “The cities are out major source of information…” Exposure (concentrated) to Devo occurs in Manchester – which is contracting / after expanding over square miles of country / to match expansion of empire based on industrial revolution (and more besides)/’on which the sun never sets’. Well now it’s set/and everything is devolving/leaving miles and miles of vacant lots like broken teeth… Location chance – could be any major city: suggest limits of expansion under present system/attitudes have occurred…
“All that talk about recombo DNA and people choosing to evolve in certain ways – that’s why we chose DE-EVOLUTION – taking apart all the assumptions of the past decade and sythesising them, mutation them, putting them back together with a new attitude. De-evolution is simply a collective idea that’s given momentum…
In this sorry ending to out 70s Devo preach devolution from Ohio. Have cut two released singles: Jocko Homo/Mongoloid, Satisfaction/Sloppy. The last is the Stones song, stripped and played the way Bowie wanted to play Let’s Spend The Night Together on Aladdin Sane (got halfway there only). Wipes out the 60s finally. Indications already that sublimity is being concentrated into vinyl (all the better to flow out the airwaves) with the hysteria/theatre/all-out attack on environment/perception/’reality’ reserved for ‘live’ performances. They excite ‘Jon Savage’ like nothing since The Clash…
“I’ve had all I can take / you know I can’t take any more / gotta gut feeling / gotta gut feeling / a feeling / feeliing / (screams)…’ sung android… synapses snap as Devo circles abound. I go ape. “God made man, but apes supplied the glue” O O O O Oh. Go beyond words in Sloppy.
Devo/devoid/void/voidoid: Richard Hell. Goes beyond words in Liars Beware. Of the dog: on stage, Manchester Apollo: “I wanna be your dog” Hell and two grown men bark for two minutes. Iggy: has offered to produce them. Found tape lying round at Bowie’s house. Further: “We could play you tapes that are three years old – when you listen to the drum tracks on them, the closest thing to them now is the new stuff Bowie’s doing on his Low album, and the new Iggy, Lust for Life…
You want New Musick, social fools? Beyond… “I think we hav e to look at Germany at this point. Germany has totally avoided the hippie 60s… I listen to Kraftwerk. They’re very pretentious, that’s the problem. Like to take a lot of their sound. I wish I had their master tracks, their unmixed masters… they use everything: a lot of sequencers, tape delays, very mechanistic. But over it, these kind of Humanitarian Art Lyrics…” Some Devo songs heard out of their 75… Praying Hands/Uncontrollable Urge/Too Much Paranoia/Be Stiff/Smart Patrol – Mr DNA/Clock Out/Auto-mowdown/Penetration in the Centrefold. Music is flashing, series of images, climaxes of hysteria, of white light/heat instants of vision. Dis-orientation: themes out of context. Already well know, made unfamilar, eerie in the new context. Ultimate purpose of camp (cultural) sensibility…
People tend to put a frame around their realities and “This takes care of that, once and for all!” – whereas with Burroughs’ cut-ups, each thing is a piece, but then taken all together it is all shuffled and redistributed so that within the structure the variations on a theme are pretty infinite. Like what’s been going on with things like the IMAGE BANK for a number of years – where images are public and anyone can use them and reuse them in and out of context. Most people have an absolutist view, a rigid view of reality – They Know What’s What! Like Popeye: “I yam what I yam an’ that’s all what I yam!” Actually, we always thought Popeye presented a pretty Devo view of humanity, especially the old cartoons, where the soundtrack is mainly composed of grunts and groans, all kinds of sub-human utterings…
Occasional sources appear to be: years of television-watching (NOW the generation never without TV takes hold radiation mutation…) / obscure SF movies / montage / dAdA / kitsch. For visuals. Disturbing: dreamlike / subconscious connections pulled together and fused into a whole of great power. Back to the womb: during Jocko Homo humans wrapped in latex writhe foetally. Q: Are We Not Men? They answer: We are DEVO! Conscious enactment of retrograde impulses/ results in face of over-mechanisation / acceleration…
“The words get stuck in my throat…” Similar ‘analysis’ of the music releals the same: fragments detected of Beefheart / Talking Heads / Lothar and the Hand People / Love / maybe reggae. All these are no doubt un/intentional. Again – the whole is above the sum of its parts. Filling a gap so tight, that you didn’t know existed until you heard them.
“The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be. With synthesisers you can express gutteral sounds, bird noises, brain waves, blood flow. It’s like putting more immediate information into the music; keep destroying the stylisation for content.”
Enough. Await the future general availability of records / video / live performances. This a response homefully in kind to what Devo do: attempt at medium as the message. Open the box – lateral-think… cut up and reassembled to offer some kind of introductory context for your attention but little more…
Only concern: de-evolution promoted by the wrong sources? Devo as ‘art’ for well-defined positive ends but others less scrupulous, like NF/punk would be (thankfully) connection – to be watched.
At last a real future-shift. Devo – hallucinations from our collective TV womb – offer systematic dis-moving to reorganisation. And on a mass level: “We’re actually approaching normalcy. We’re gonna slip in…!” – there are aliens in our midst.
(reprinted/adapted from Girl Trouble #7 and Search & Destroy)