Wednesday, February 17, 2010

A SWEET ROMANTIC PRODUCT PLACEMENT, FOR YOU, FOR YOU, FOR YOU...: You may have heard that Devo has been reincarnated ... or perhaps reanimated, and playing shows of their old material in DC, Chicago, NYC, LA, SF, over the last months of 2009. Now it seems they're firmly committed to being recommodified, and will be performing at the Olympics in a corporately coordinated fit of conspicuous self-promotion. Original members have put together a new album, of new material, and distanced themselves from the evil elf-mouse hybrid "Devo 2.0" that was pushed on an uninterested public a few years ago. Indeed, the acid intelligence of the band I love is evident again in interviews and performances, and the new project is explicitly being conceived as an attempt to embrace and exploit modern media and marketing processes. Note the gentle tweaking of CNN's sloganeering balls in their Olympic-flogging interview with the band: "'What do you think?' We want to know."

New material by the original members could hardly fail to have more appeal than Devo 2.0, the derailed-by-Disney 2005-2006 kiddie pop effort that made the shriveled remnants of my youthful soul scream and cry in an impotent fit of desk chair rebellion. The heart of the problem with the 2.0 project, as Bob and Gerry Casale explain in this YouTubed interview, was that Mice Have No Genitals. (That's a tidy summary that works on a number of levels, but the whole interview is worth a look.) Casale's further explanation that the band agreed to change their music for Disney --- for example, to "make it about junk food" instead of more existential issues --- because the result was somehow more perverse, because it was "de-evolution for real," resonates only weakly. Clearly, there are some things you can do without, and that's good.

So, for your consideration, here's Devo's YouTube channel, where can be found November/December 2009 concert footage and some predictable but congenial propaganda and product-flogging (and links, of course, to more of the same at Devo-branded sites).

ETA:
Compared to other locations, the recent concert videos from Los Angeles are generally of superior sound and video quality.

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