Oh, No! It's Devo

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Devo’s fifth album, 1982’s <i>Oh, No! It’s Devo</i>, completes the automaton-rock vision that the band members had been pursuing since their 1978 debut: Guitars take a backseat, synths blink in prismatic textures, and the beats are absolutely metronomic. Though these distrustful robo-punks were beloved by fans—or “spuds,” in Devo parlance—the band still hadn’t fully won over the critical establishment by the early 1980s. Some dismissed the group as clowns, due to the band members’ performance-art-inflected presentations; others dubbed Devo fascists, thanks to the group’s satirical homogeneity. The musicians took such critiques as a challenge. “Mark [Mothersbaugh] and I thought, ‘Hmmm, fascist clowns,’” remembered Jerry Casale. “‘What would a record sound like by fascist clowns?’” The answer is the stomping, silly, sloganeering <i>Oh, No! It’s Devo</i>, an album whose very title points to the group’s uneasy place in the mega-corporate music business. The album found Devo hooking up with producer Roy Thomas Baker, best known for his gargantuan-sounding work with the likes of Queen, Journey, Foreigner, and The Cars. As a result, the synths zap like cartoon lightning-strikes on tracks like “Explosions” and “Big Mess.” The peppy single “That’s Good,” meanwhile, turns a driving beat and fleet of synthesizer sounds into a legitimate dance hit (the song landed in the Top 10 on the Hot Dance/Disco chart—a career peak). Still, <i>Oh, No! It’s Devo</i>’s most heavily scrutinized song may have been “I Desire,” which was based on a poem by John Hinckley Jr., who’d attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981. “He let us take a poem that he had written, and we used it for the lyrics and turned it into a love song,” said Mothersbaugh. “It was not the best career move you could make. We had the FBI calling up and threatening us.” Though the album was not a commercial success, <i>Oh, No! It’s Devo</i> would earn a reputation as a weirdo gem in the years to come. Anyone introduced to Devo through Weird Al Yankovic's style-copping tribute “Dare to Be Stupid” can see the throughline in the textures of “Deep Sleep.” And when Disney recruited Devo for the teen-pop project Devo 2.0, the subsequent album would lead not with tried-and-true favorite “Whip It,” but with the <i>Oh, No! It’s Devo</i> cut “That’s Good.”

via Apple Music

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