(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Kraftwerk prophesied the coming of an android humanity. Devo made a documentary about it, taking for granted that it was already here among us. Kraftwerk coined a form of "electronic song" to accompany their apocalyptic prophecies. Devo coined a form of "electronic punk rock" to accompany their "documentaries." Kraftwerk were German and carried the immense tragedy of the Holocaust: their music was somber and sorrowful. Devo came from the alternative clubs where the Dictators and Ramones performed: their music was comic and satirical. In essence, however, an ideal line connects the two, just as an ideal line connects early 1970s German rock to the American new wave that followed a few years later.

Devo, formed in 1972 in Akron by three singer-guitarists (Mark and Robert Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale), launched the global fashion of the mechanical man. Thanks to a performance of rhythmic gestures and a costume as robot astronauts, their philosophy of de-evolution immediately resonated with the new wave audience and became one of its existential components.

De-evolution is the reverse of Darwinian evolution of the species. Devo propose that the human species is mutating to adapt to the technological environment. De-evolution is therefore the disappearance of emotions; it is the rise of a uniform mediocrity in which the individual is merely a number; it is the progressive, blind faith in the machine—the solver of all problems (to the point where the master/servant relationship becomes ambiguous and undefinable); it is the awareness of having nothing to fear from technology.

Devo stand as minstrels of this dis-humanity from which emotions have been eradicated. Their language proceeds in jerks, punctuated by mongoloid-like stammers, nervous tics, and subnormal spasms. The puerile stupidity, which encapsulates the mentality of the de-evolved, is distorted by programmed hiccups and electronic vibrations, and is completely devoid of that "human" element that could indicate a path to salvation. The tragic-comic tone stems from a sense of melancholy and loneliness that is slyly masked in the outpouring of parodic riffs and mutating slogans.

The mixture that triggers the pantomime is, moreover, made up of urban rock in the MC5 and Stooges school, synthesized according to the dictates of master Eno, an exceptional patron, with a touch of Zappian novelty and Teutonic emphasis. The group emerged thanks to a short film presented at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in March 1976, which used one of their 1975 tracks, The Truth about De-Evolution, as its soundtrack.

The debut album, Are We Not Men (Warner Bros, 1978), is a breathtaking rock work that strings one anthem after another. The saga of Devo’s epic and clownish hard rock opens with the slashes and syncopations of Uncontrollable Urge, which is, in fact, an innocuous beat-style chorus, and continues with the explosive Space Junk, the crescendoing cosmic-psychedelic trip Gut Feeling, and the epileptic country-blues Come Back Jonee, culminating in the whip-like, dizzyingly gypsy charge of Sloppy; a tightrope-walking, ironic parade of de-evolved chronicles in which prophetic tone and adolescent frenzy merge. Mark Mothersbaugh’s cold, mechanical vocals reveal existential anguish, urban neurosis, and psychopathic violence. Particularly notable are the hypnotic tribalism of Mongoloid and the robotic ballad Jocko Homo, tracks closest to Bowie’s decadentism and most easily associated with the band’s android iconography.

But the futuristic joke degenerates too quickly into a ridiculous product for teenagers stupefied by TV cartoons. Blockhead and S.I.B. on Duty Now For The Future (Warner Bros, 1979), Whip It, Freedom Of Choice, and Girl U Want on Freedom Of Choice (Warner Bros, 1980), Going Under and Beautiful World on New Traditionalists (Warner Bros, 1981), Peek-A-Boo on Oh No It's Devo (Warner Bros, 1982), the mischievous songs of their maturity, are very close to Zappa’s "idiot songs": if their libertarian ideology is so puerile that it could be mistaken for satire, and their social vision so confused that it seems like pop-art nonsense, their music is in reality nothing more than a "devolved" caricature set to a "disco" beat of classic rock from all eras.
The later albums, Shout (Warner Bros, 1984), Total Devo (Enigma, 1988), and Smooth Noodle Maps (Enigma, 1990) are completely devoid of content.

Mark Mothersbaugh also released two volumes of Muzik For Insomniaks (Enigma, 1988).

Torn between an image of 21st-century troubadours and one of music-hall acrobats, between that of high school pranksters at a costume party and comic-book superheroes, Devo embody the sub-subculture and childish regression at the core of the punk phenomenon. These premises are reworked into an ideology that is the quintessence of cynicism and narcissism: they despise and mock capitalism, yet at the same time absorb and process its most corrupt aspects.