Winamp Monday: It's Not for Me
Evolving and devolving to find something newly traditional.
Winamp Wednesday Monday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
DEVO, “Beautiful World”
Oh no! It’s (finally time for) DEVO!
Still with me after witnessing Booji Boy’s frozen face? Cool, let’s get into it!
No matter how much slack I have, I don’t think that I’m the person who could write the definitive manifesto on De-evolution. I don’t think I even fully understand it. DEVO springs from a semi-satirical idea that mankind has actually regressed over time, that the homogenized Baby Boom society in which the band’s members had been raised was in fact a de-evolved state from previous generations. Bassist Gerard Casale has also pointed to The Beginning Was the End, a truly strange bit of 70s pseudoscientific hooey that proclaims man to be the product of apes who cannibalized other ape brains, mutating rather than evolving. It’s the sort of idea that must have felt somewhat compelling as pop science fifty-odd years ago but feels ill-researched and stupefyingly bigoted now.
But humanity must have felt blighted, unevolved, totally mutated to the members of DEVO. Casale and bandmate Mark Mothersbaugh were students at Kent State in 1970 and witnessed the May 4th Massacre. As Casale told it to the Vermont Review in 2005:
It may sound trite or glib. All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was white hippie boy and than I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew. Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherf&*$#ers. It was total utter bullshit. Live ammunition and gasmasks – none of us knew, none of us could have imagined. They shot into a crowd that was running. I stopped being a hippie and I started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real, real pissed off.
There is no way to face down the horrors of history, to see them firsthand, without having the way you see the world forever change. The least you can do is get very pissed off. What you do with that rage is what defines you. The world can still be beautiful in fits and starts, but you have to fight for that. Because now you know how terrible it can be.
“Beautiful World” is a perfect ironic statement of that belief. DEVO were suddenly hitmakers after Freedom of Choice hit the Billboard Top 30 and “Whip It” became an instant classic. A lot of bands would (and did in the New Wave era) go back into the studio to record essentially the same album again. In the spirit of devolution, DEVO wrote an album about how they don’t plan to be popular for long, filled it with alienating lyrics, and named it after a hyper-conservative Japanese political movement. New Traditionalists is an album for weirdos having a terrible time of it, and even the non-album single cover of “Workin’ in a Coalmine” sounds like somebody’s bad ideas made manifest inside a xylophone factory. DEVO believes in devolution and they’re going to show you how and why even when singing someone else’s songs.
Meanwhile, Rage Against the Machine put together this inexplicably witless and backwards cover twenty years after the original. Devolution indeed.
Of course I loved New Traditionalists right from the jump. It played piecemeal on New York’s alternative and rock stations for years afterwards, meaning my childhood was dotted by “Through Being Cool” and “Jerkin’ Back and Forth”, songs that felt welcoming in a futuristic way through the lens of a weird kid. When you’re ten years old or thereabouts you’re not listening to the lyrics and nobody’s going to sit you down and explain the esoteric and probably half-kidding political ethos of a band. A kid learns to love a band because a song is easy to dance to and it’s got a beat they can’t deny.
Which is how I came to first love “Beautiful World” through a montage in an episode of Mann & Machine.
That has to be some kind of circular employment of devolution, finding a song about the world’s ironies and the inability to conjure joy as one matures inside a Dick Wolf show about a sexy robot cop in near-future Los Angeles. It wasn’t just copaganda, it was copaganda that fully missed the point of both RoboCop and Moonlighting. And yet I loved that show! All seven episodes before it was yanked off NBC to be rerun incessantly on the early days of Sci-Fi Channel. And this song made me love DEVO outside of the confines of the power domes and one perfect hit song.
Maybe we’re all devolved a little bit. I know for a fact that I was when I was in high school. Adolescence makes us run on this primal idea that we are meant for something and that we have to be somewhere, but that’s all Mad Libs until years later whoops we find ourselves in the groove that will guide us for decades. Kids know a groove when they hear it, but teens have to have their own individual meaning. That’s probably why I came back to this song in the cold December days of 2000. I needed a groove and that episode of Mann & Machine had been back in rotation. Devolving to a younger self in a sort of absurd way. I needed Mark Mothersbaugh to drone that it’s a beautiful world for me, and I didn’t need to look any further than that. After all, the man was already soundtracking my life with things like Rushmore. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a beautiful world with him and his bandmates?
Devolved for just a few minutes on a synthesizer hook and some out-there vocals. Dancing like we’re all young again. Eventually all the sadness will return, the horrors of the past and present. Soon enough it will be complicated again. But for three minutes? It’s a beautiful world we live in.
Next Time: The ones who imagined it all.