Devo is an American rock band from Akron, Ohio, formed in 1972. Their classic line-up consisted of Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale, Bob Casale and Alan Myers. The band had a No. 14 Billboard chart hit in 1980 with the single “Whip It”, the song that gave the band mainstream popularity.
Intro/Bio
Devo is known for their music and stage shows mingling kitsch science fiction themes, deadpan surrealist humour and mordantly satirical social commentary. Their early, pre-Warner Bros. dissonant songs use synthetic instrumentation and time signatures proved influential on popular music, particularly new wave, industrial, and alternative rock artists.
Devo (most enthusiastically Gerald Casale) was also a pioneer of the music video, creating clips for the LaserDisc format, with “Whip It” getting heavy airplay in the early days of MTV.
Devo launched the fashion of the mechanical man all over the world. Thanks to a performance of rhythmic gestures and a disguise as robot astronauts, their philosophy of de-evolution immediately caught the attention of the new wave audience and became one of its existential components. De-evolution is the reverse of the Darwinian evolution of the species, they propose that the human species is mutating to adapt to the technological environment. De-evolution is then the disappearance of emotions, the affirmation of a uniform mediocrity in which an individual is only a number.