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I heard Devo properly, for the first time, in the dark and girm winter of '01. Until then the flowerpot men from O-Hi-O had been knocking around in my back brain for a while: dad had certainly mentioned them a few times, and a name as straight-up warped as Devo sticks in your brain. A brief clip of them on a(n excellent) four hour channel 4 documentory on the history of the music video kind of kept them bubbling along in my back-brain but it wasn't until December 2001 that I took the plunge and bought their glossy double CD retrospecive "Pioneers Who Got Scalped".
And I hated it. For about 24 hours.
Devo's music scared me - the opening skit, with General Boy and his mutant son Booji Boy discussing "the papers the chinaman gave you" was backed by weird proto-synth oscollations, and "Jocko Homo" and "Mongaloid" just plain depressed me. I felt scared, I didn't know what music was anymore. That sounds like so much crap but that's really how I felt.
I played it again the next day and WHAM. Everything clicked into place.
Devo destroyed a musical paridigim in my head. They shattered a lot of ideas and conceptions I had about music into tiny peices. It was more or less the closest thing I've had to a religious experience.
Here was music that was a fun and weird and playful as any pop but as tightly wound around a paranoid emotional core as any speed-adled punk group. It was a sound which had influenced most of what I'd heard ever since.
I loved it. I still do. Devo might end for me at "Big Mess" or "Peek-a-Boo" (as much as I love crazy covers of NIN, Devo's later half was as de-evolutionary and bland as the forces they were intended to spoof. At least to me) but the stuff on the first two albums is insanely, massively great: "Strange Persuit", "Smart Patrol/Mr DNA", "Jocko Homo", "Mongoloid", "Space Junk", "Clockout".
I don't really have a point or an ending to this. I just wanted to tell you all how much I love Devo.
And remember: A man is real, not made of steel:
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