The Return Of DEVO
After 20 years, DEVO has made their official return. Sure, for the past 20 years, they’ve resurfaced at a few concerts, have written new music for ad jingles, and have even recorded a children’s album Kidz Bop-style – but now, they have a real album out, called ‘Something for Everybody’. There’s a reason for that title.
I collected DEVO back in the mid-90s, after they’d kinda closed up shop and I was really discovering music, though I’d been unconsciously listening to DEVO since birth. We just happened to have a DEVO kind of household. DEVO has also always been a band which made a point of offering up odd collectibles from early on, including Energy Dome hats, limited edition records, nuclear jumpsuits and lenticular cards from the inner liners of their vinyl releases. However, for the last 20 years, things ran a bit slower than usual as each band member pursued different projects by themselves. If you visit DEVO’s website today, you’re hit with a plethora of collectibles to rival the old days.
Everything about this new DEVO is a rebirth. They still maintain the philosophy that mankind was entering a dark age of de-evolution, and their current reappearance couldn’t be more appropriate. We exist at a critical point in human greed, anti-intellectualism, self destruction and shortsightedness, and DEVO’s been telling us that this was coming all along through synth-pop, new wave beats. Leading up to this new album, DEVO ran a series of weirdly generic, streamlined focus groups over the internet which permitted the public to choose almost everything about how they would return, ranging from their costumes to the songs which would be included on their new album.
The methodology here is not revolutionary, but the new contention is that we’ve finally reached a point where we’ve de-evolved not into cavemen or potatoes, but mindless automatons from prefer comfort to innovation. By putting everything through a filter of the most common denominator, DEVO has produced, presumably, what everyone would most like to see. Fortunately for us, DEVO continues to write great music – even when most of it criticizes the homogenization process that they’d just subjected us to.
As a robotic consumer, I can’t help but want some of the new merchandise which DEVO is offering, which includes a bevy of awesomely dorky t-shirts and a series of great poster designs from gigs in the past two years. But by buying DEVO merchandise, are you part of the problem or part of the solution? Are you spreading the DEVO gospel, or are you just being a consumer? I’m sure that the irony is not lost on them.
Either way, it’s great to see DEVO continuing the great tradition of concert posters, and there are surely more to come. I’ll be looking for a way to get in on that gig.












