DEVO

My infinitely busy life doesn’t allow for all that much video game playing, but time after time, I’m sucked away form important obligations (sleeping, eating,…. love) and back onto the Playstation with the promise of continuing Guitar Hero fun. Even more than the ability to shoot lasers from my eyes or power up my madcore uber-blaster, playing the pseudo-guitar just has a certain mystical appeal. It’s just one of those games that seems to exist in its own universe, with its own physics, and its own completely unique brand of fun. I’ve collected and played the hell out of Guitar Hero 1 and 2, so the promise of new songs to play with ‘Guitar Hero : Rocks the 80s‘ was appealing.

For the uninitiated, the Guitar Hero player holds a guitar-shaped controller with 5 buttons along the neck, a strumming bar-button where one would normally strum, and a whammy bar. As colored notes drop down the screen, one must press down the corresponding button on the neck of the guitar, and at the same time, hit the strum bar. Notes drop quickly, you build up points and ‘Star Power’ with increased accuracy, and the whammy bar can also be wiggled during extended notes for more points. It takes a lot of coordination, but once you learn the language, it’s almost automatic.

Because of this manual complexity, the Guitar Hero games have a lot of replay value as you hone your dexterity – many dozens of songs per game, four increasingly hard difficulty levels, the ability to earn money at gigs to purchase more guitars and more characters and more songs, the ability to play head-to-head games, and in some modes, the choice to play bass, rhythm or lead guitar. Game options and mechanics were improved between the two previous releases, and the selection of songs in each game is fairly wide – but a game that focused mainly on 1980s music was something that I had to pick up immediately.

I grew up on Oingo Boingo, Men at Work, DEVO, The English Beat and the like – all more along the lines of the new wave of the 80s. Only a few of these songs are represented in this game, since it leans very heavily towards the hair metal genre. I played through the game without looking up a setlist of available songs, hoping to be surprised by some lost gem of an 80s tune that I could rock out to, and I was pleasantly surprised to come across Oingo Boingo’s ‘Only a Lad‘ – and familiarity with a song lends a LOT, at least in my case, to the ability to play it accurately. Aside from that, I was largely unfamiliar with the selection of songs. Maybe my generational perception is skewed, but the game feels much more like a ‘Rocks the Early 1990s’ than anything else.

This is not to say that hair metal is not a terribly fun genre of music, when you stop taking it seriously. Anyone who’s heard ‘The Final Countdown‘ by Europe (sadly, not included) knows what I’m talking about. While I anxiously awaited a song from The Darkness to come across the screen, in some form of self-conscious, self-deprecating reference to the ridiculousness of hair metal, it never happened, and all but one of the songs were genuine 1980s material – but while I didn’t get to thrash along to ‘I Believe in a Thing Called Love’, that moment of all-important self-awareness came with the inclusion of Limozeen’s classic hit ‘Because, It’s Midnite‘. Anyone who knows who Limozeen is will realize that this song was a perfect complement to ‘Trogdor’ on Guitar Hero 2. Both find their origins on Homestarrunner.com, a long-running internet cartoon of much hilarity. Alas, while Trogdor was a really hard song to play along to, ‘Midnite’ is unusually easy to play.

I played through ‘medium’ difficulty in a night without any failed songs, unlocked the character of The Grim Ripper (who is essentially Death, skeleton face, robes and all – but in the 80’s, he sports a giant Flava Flav clock and some 3D glasses), and even got to see the final stage where I giant squid attacks the background – but was very disappointed when there were no extra songs to purchase! As a result of these extra songs just not existing, the setlist is considerably shorter than other Guitar Hero games. This wouldn’t be such a tragedy, but for all of the decreased replay value and longevity, the game still cost 50 bucks. To charge as much as the previous Guitar Hero games, which had more functionality, and without notifying the buyer somehow that this was a lesser game, doesn’t sit well with me. I mean, does anyone REALLY care about buying a black finish for your guitar over being able to play the opening licks on DEVO’s ‘Gut Feeling‘?

I think not.

Overall, it’s a great expansion onto the Guitar Hero collection of games, and I’d love to see a whole set of ‘Encore’ games that focus on collections from certain genres or musicians – but for fifty dollars, increase the setlist, or at least offer some kind of bonus material should you also have other Guitar Hero games saved in your memory blocks. I feel a bit shortchanged. Bathed in the warm glow of intense fun, but still shortchanged.

Buy it, but wait until it drops into the 20 dollar range in 6 months. It’s not going anywhere.

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Gotta Collect? Then You Gotta Connect – Join our Collectors’ Community!

From the first notes of ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ emitted from my ‘Are We Not Men?‘ vinyl picturedisc spinning on a decrepit turntable, I was hooked on DEVO. Post-punk new-wave nerd-rock was in my blood, and the record was inherited from a slightly-previous generation of aficionados of the unusual.

I presume that it would have been difficult to grow up in the 1980s without getting sucked into DEVO at least in some small way, especially when the rest of your life was already saturated with Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Oingo Boingo, all of which form the strangest entangled trifecta of my childhood. Even beyond DEVO’s ‘Whip It‘ and ‘Satisfaction‘ videos being a very important part of early MTV, the inherent fun of the music kept me addicted. So, scoured from tag sales and cassette tapes at the old Camelot Music store at the mall, I began to understand DEVO. The very first CD that I ever bought, days after I got my first CD player, was ‘DEVO’s Greatest Hits‘.

DEVO, in their heyday, was a band that was almost entirely, unflinchingly conceptual. Sure, bands come and go and make concept albums based around strange ideas like Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall‘ or ‘Numbers‘ by Cat Stevens, but DEVO’s whole existence was based around a pseudo-cult, and your personal indoctrination was through robotic, synthesized song. Outwardly expressing their melodic disdain for general society and the paths that human evolution was taking, they preached (with half-seriousness) the theory of de-evolution, hence their name. Forever calling the general populace ’spuds’ or ‘mutants’, we loved them anyhow, most likely because we all envisioned ourselves as partially exempt from being a contributing factor to the declining state of the world. If you listen carefully, a fair number of their hit songs, from ‘Jocko Homo’ to ‘Mongoloid’ to ‘Smart Patrol’ all follow the ideas of how mankind isn’t exactly living up to its potential and falling victim to a serious backslide. The song ‘Smart Patrol’ is pretty much about how DEVO themselves must sleep with a lot of women to save the human race, and floppy-haired, spastic front man Mark Mothersbaugh couldn’t have been more convincing. Their secret vitriol almost matched my own, myself entering my ‘grunge’ years, which perched like a grotesque gargoyle on the precipice of my storied ‘goth’ years.

So, along with Jethro Tull, DEVO formed a crucial part of my self, and it’s only been a couple of weeks that I’ve regressed (some might say de-evolved) into my passion for DEVO again, and with that realization came the further realization that I was missing some very important CDs and tapes that were once part of my collection. Even stranger, two particular volumes entitled ‘Hardcore DEVO Volumes 1&2‘ from Rykodisc had become tremendously scarce and were nearly impossible to find. If you could find them, you could expect to pay upwards of eighty dollars per volume. Until this point, I was completely unaware that a music CD could fetch such an exorbitant price. Early recordings and demos from any band are usually hot items among the more devoted and inspired collectors, but this brought to light the strange culture of DEVO and how totally collectible it was.

I’ve grown up in a culture in which CDs are dispensable, replicatable and indestructible objects, made even less desirable with the advent of the MP3. Why carry around a disc of plastic with 12 songs on it when you could carry around a credit-card sized device with thousands of songs? Ergo, it was wholly surreal to imagine that a CD could be worth such a fortune.

DEVO themselves have offered strange cult-like collectibles over the years, from the energy dome hats used in the ‘Whip It‘ video and in stage performances, to lenticular wiggle discs and propaganda-like posters, all vital elements to the subculture that the band, and only the band, was. While most of this stuff surfaced and vanished before I was of age to be making a disposable income, the one keen collectible that I managed to inherit later was a 1980 Central Park Music Festival pin, from the ‘Freedom of Choice‘ era. There are some wild collectors out there, though, especially Michael Pilmer, who has received personal donations from DEVO themselves to his obsessive collection, which includes everything from tour memorabilia to signed checks from the DEVO guys.

I found ‘Hardcore DEVO’ in my garage after an exhaustive search, the sweat and scratches and more than a few scares by fist-sized spiders well worth the $160 I didn’t have to re-spend to complete my collection, and thus, my soul. I respectfully refrain from showing you the covers of these CDs within this article due to the explicit nature of them (perhaps also truncating their lives in CD stores of the time), but man, it’s good stuff. You totally need it. DEVO’s MySpace page has a sample song from it, as well as some early live performances, so go forth and spread the DEVO.

Excelsior, spuds!