Devolution, enshittification, nostalgia

Devo on Netflix, LCD Soundsystem in Toronto

Devo live, before they’d really worked the costumes out…

Devolution on Netflix (a redundancy?)

I first heard of Devo as a child from a teacher who told us about some band he’d heard of called “the Delvoes” who “sing with golf balls in their mouths.” My friend and I thought this was hilarious and went around for weeks singing “we awwww duh dlllvooos” in what we imagined would be the voices of people whose mouths were jammed with golf balls, strapped on like ball gags, not that we knew what ball gags were. This broken-telephone-game first impression was pretty typical of what Devo would face their whole career.

Chris Smith’s terrific Devo documentary has made its way to Netflix a year and a half after premiering at Sundance. What it finally makes clear is that Devo was the original Chumbawamba—a political art collective (formed, in Devo’s case, in the wake of the 1970 National Guard shootings at Kent State, where the key members were students) that later pursued pop commercialism in order to diffuse its ideas more widely, only to be misunderstood as a wacky novelty-song act when it succeeded. But Devo’s campaign was more effective: The Ohio band’s burst of visibility lasted longer, and because from the start the project was about creating images as much as sounds, it was in pole position when the video age arrived, which gave it a more multisensory impact. … And, even though I’m a big Chumbas fan, Devo’s work was ultimately just better.

As they explain repeatedly in the doc, their ideology was absolutely one of protest and opposition to consumer culture and America’s righward drift under Reaganism. But it was less programmatic and more absurdist than the anarcho-punk kind, making it more difficult to pin down or co-opt, although also easier to overlook as political at all. But no matter, because perhaps more than any other subversively minded artists who’ve ever had crossover success, Devo’s core philosophy also anticipated how it would ruin them. Their guiding “de-evolution” theory predicted that they too would be subjected to the same grinding, regressive dumbing-down of culture. In many ways it was a version of what we currently refer to as “enshittification” in tech culture, but applied to the entire fate of so-called civilization.

The most exciting part of the film inevitably is getting to see archival stuff from before anybody knew who Devo was, some familiar to fans, others less so. And then how the rise of punk both transformed them (the Ramones made them realize they should double the speed of their songs) and offered them a platform—with the likes of John Lennon, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, and Andy Warhol starting to show up to their New York gigs circa 1977. Their first SNL spot in Oct. 1978 is still jaw-dropping. But it might be the later parts of the narrative that stick with me most: how they dealt with record-company pressure to have a hit, got one beyond their imaginings with “Whip It!” in 1980-81 (a song originally meant to be more anti-work-ethic than anything to do with S&M), then gradually felt more and more like cogs in the very mechanisms they set out to critique.

Some fans will be disappointed the doc doesn’t deal with their surprisingly fine 2010 reunion album and other legacy matters. But the emphasis on their dispersion into other careers (Mark Mothersbaugh as a sought-after film and TV scorer, and co-leader Jerry Casal partly as a TV commercial director) sets the right elegaic tone: In our world as constituted, nothing like Devo can last, even if it does survive. And there’s no place more fitting for the film than Netflix, a once at least moderately promising platform that’s become a prime showcase of enshittified culture. Savor this rare exception.

PS 1: Since it’s a thing of mine, I did wish the doc had more on their interactions with the 1970s Akron/Cleveland scenes—bands that clearly shared some of their sensibility, like Pere Ubu, Tin Huey, the Waitresses, and 15-60-75 (aka the Numbers Band, which Jerry Casale briefly joined, but was reportedly kicked out for wearing a monkey mask on stage). But for that I guess I will have to read the recent The Beginning was the End: Devo in Ohio, by Jade Dellinger and David Giffels.

PS 2: As companion listening, I highly recommend the Aug. 21 edition of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, an interview with Peter Conheim, an artist, sound editor, and film restorer, who among many other things has been working with Devo on preserving their archives. Conheim is also a former member of Negativland, the four-decade-running Bay Area sound collage and culture jamming collective, and he and Maron have an interesting exchange about that whole sphere of anti-commercial culture (also including RE/Search publications, the Residents, etc.), wondering to what extent the equivalent is possible today.

(Devo will be in Toronto on Sept. 24 with the equally epochal B-52s and Lene Lovich at the Ontario Place beer-sponsored amphitheatre [suds for spuds!], kicking off the “Cosmic De-Evolution Tour.” See you on the lawn?)

LCD Soundsystem at History (another redundancy?), Aug. 24

(The above clip of LCD Soundsystem at History in Toronto is not by me, from a different show than I attended, and from much closer than where I stood, but it gets the gist.)

While I’ve always liked LCD Soundsystem, thinking of them in the same moment as Devo reminds me that I’ve also always been puzzled whether they have any conceptual coherence in the end. I could put it that I’ve always already liked LCD Soundsystem, given that, as announced by “Losing My Edge” in 2005, they were created by someone pretty much exactly my age with pretty much exactly my taste to express exactly my sensation that perhaps we’d already missed everything good but we had to carry on anyway. My friend Chris, with me at the show, suggested it was the ultimate Gen X anthem. A decade-later sequel to “Loser,” I suggested—“my time is a piece of wax falling on a termite/ that's choking on the splinters.”

Or maybe only ultimate as in “final.” Due to leader James Murphy’s peculiar out-of-synchness with the otherwise younger Y2Ks NYC scene from which LCD sprang, this Gen X anthem was listened to mostly by millennials who couldn’t have experienced the things it talked about. Cleverly, Murphy included among its torrent of “I was there” references many things that he also couldn’t have experienced, except via his record collection, like Can in Cologne in 1968, two years before Murphy was born. He was always already losing his edge.

So now Chris and I were there, 20 years after that song came out, at the aptly named History, a venue that didn’t exist then, surrounded by millennials expressing their nostalgia for Murphy’s nostalgia. Which is our nostalgia, as his contemporaries, but as noted above, that’s already partly a yearning for a previous generation’s nostalgia. And the millennials were interspersed with even younger people who I guess were yearning for the millennials’ nostalgia. Mirrors within mirrors, regressing.

It was the final show in a three-night sold-out stand in the 2,500-capacity, two-level room, which reminds me of a sleeked-up small-town hockey arena, but with VIP sections. If you’ve seen the unusually good 2012 concert film Shut Up and Play the Hits, you’ll know Murphy’s way of alternating from wandering diffidently among the rest of the ensemble (eight or nine people all told this weekend) to throwing himself suddenly, passionately into a song. Which shouldn’t work for a room this size. They get away with it thanks to the array of lights across the three-tiered stage, with the signature disco ball overhead, and most of all the dancing yellow and black shapes on the backdrop that I nicknamed the “LED Screensystem.”

Murphy’s musical vocabulary comes directly from a small handful of specific 1970s and 1980s new-waveish artists, not Devo so much but definitely their associates and peers: Brian Eno, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Kraftwerk (a snippet of “The Model” led into “I Can Change”), New Order (part of “Your Silent Face” was folded into “Losing My Edge,” along with part of Yaz’s “Don’t Go”). LCD combined that exact tone with early 2000s tech and dance beats, recycling what once were radical gestures into a palette of effective rhetorical and sonic techniques, with an inevitable flattening that was in itself a kind of commentary. Now, it’s been nearly as long since “Losing My Edge” came out as its release was from peak New Order. To what portion of the cumulatively 7,500 people waving their arms and phones these three nights is it still a decipherable commentary? Maybe that’s an irrelevant question. Is this devolution? Enshittification? Always? Already?

The trick is that Murphy’s ability as a songwriter turned out to exceed the project’s initial meta-bounds, and in fact nearly all the rest of the 2000s indie-dancers or electroclashers or what-have-yous. Even given my ambivalent mood, I was surprised how glad I was as song followed song on the 19-song set list (with a brief “pee break” intermission, no encore): “I Can Change” and “Home” and “Dance Yrself Clean” for sheer catchiness; “North American Scum” and “American Dream” (from the underappreciated 2017 reunion album) for their applicability to the current everything (Murphy made the American-touring-in-Canada apology/solidarity statement that’s become this year’s land acknowledgement); “You Wanted a Hit” because I was thinking of Devo and Warner Brothers; and “Someone Great” and inevitable closer “All My Friends” for more sentimental reasons.

In the final minutes, as Murphy sang “Where are your friends tonight? If I could see all my friends tonight … ,” the lights swept out over the outstretched hands of the audience, all that vulnerable flesh exposed in the glare, and my heart caught in my throat. I didn’t know if I was feeling a sense of communion or a sharper loneliness. In an instant it was over and we were being herded out into the deindustrialized wilds of the east lakeshore to disperse into our various vehicles, to dwindle into streaks of tail light on the expressway, already, again. Q: “Are we not men?” A: “Yeah, I know it gets tired, but it’s better when we pretend…”