Oh, No! It's Devo

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Devo’s fifth album, 1982’s <i>Oh, No! It’s Devo</i>, completes the automaton-rock vision that the band members had been pursuing since their 1978 debut: Guitars take a backseat, synths blink in prismatic texture, and the beats are absolutely metronomic. Though these distrustful robo-punks were beloved by fans—or “spud,” in Devo parlance—the band still hadn’t fully won over the critical establishment by the early 1980. Some dismissed the group as clown, due to the band members’ performance-art-inflected presentations; others dubbed Devo fascist, thanks to the group’s satirical homogeneity. The musicians took such critiques as a challenge. “Mark [Mothersbaugh] and I thought, ‘Hmmm, fascist clown,’” remembered Jerry Casale. “‘What would a record sound like by fascist clowns?’” The answer is the stomping, silly, sloganeering <i>Oh, No! It’s Devo</i>, an album whose very title points to the group’s uneasy place in the mega-corporate music busine. The album found Devo hooking up with producer Roy Thomas Baker, best known for his gargantuan-sounding work with the likes of Queen, Journey, Foreigner, and The Car. As a result, the synths zap like cartoon lightning-strikes on tracks like “Explosions” and “Big Me.” The peppy single “That’s Good,” meanwhile, turns a driving beat and fleet of synthesizer sounds into a legitimate dance hit (the song landed in the Top 10 on the Hot Dance/Disco chart—a career peak). Still, <i>Oh, No! It’s Devo</i>’s most heavily scrutinized song may have been “I Desire,” which was based on a poem by John Hinckley Jr., who’d attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981. “He let us take a poem that he had written, and we used it for the lyrics and turned it into a love song,” said Mothersbaugh. “It was not the best career move you could make. We had the FBI calling up and threatening u.” .

via Apple Music

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