Get the latest gossip
‘Devo’ Review: Chris Smith’s Documentary About the Jump-Suited Robo-Rock Avatars of De-Evolution Is as Much Fun as Its Subject
The film traces the band's music, its videos, its freak success, and its big message, which remains prophetic and often misunderstood.
To the millions of Devo fans who came to know the band through “Whip It,” the propulsive and perverse, outrageously hooky anthem of proactive self-help that became a crossover hit for them when it was released two years later (propelled by a music video that winked at the song’s sadomasochistic subtext), my story probably sounds a bit silly. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, the band was a lot of things — performance-art showmen, pioneers of music video, satirical absurdists with a big message (that American society wasn’t progressing — it was devolving), and, not so incidentally, sizzling musicians who created their own brand of inside-out rock ‘n’ roll. They drew on a crazed welter of inspirations, many of them decades old: the Dada art movement of the early 20th century; a rabble-rousing pamphlet from 1933 that featured the words “Jocko Homo” and images of monkeys and the devil emblazoned, on his chest, with the word “de-evolution”; the postmodern prankishness of Andy Warhol; and, finally, the moment that brought it all together, when they saw the 1932 science-fiction horror film “Island of Lost Souls,” in which Charles Laughton played a mad scientist trying to turn animals into humans, a scenario that gives rise to the mythic phrase (uttered by Bela Lugosi’s Sayer of the Law), “Are we not men?”
Or read this on Variety
