DEVO’s Duty Now for the Future: Mutate, Don’t Stagnate (Part 2 of 4)

Continued from Part One…

After a 10-year hiatus, DEVO came back in the ‘90s, and the band has been active ever since. The last studio album was Something for Everybody. It was well-received, but that was 15, 16 years ago. These days, is DEVO a live act only, or is studio work something that’s still rattling around in your heads as a possibility for the future?

Mark Mothersbaugh: We talk about it. I’m at a recording studio now; I score here every day. I write music, and I’ve been here for 35 years. And Bob Mothersbaugh is downstairs; I’m not sure what he’s doing right now, but we talk about it, and we end up writing. Bob and I recently wrote a song for Plankton: The Movie. And I’m doing something with Jack Black later this year for another Minecraft movie, I think. So we still record stuff here.

As far as DEVO doing things, I would be tickled. I’ve got a lot of music and a lot of lyrics. And it’s complicated to be an artist working with other artists. Jerry and Bob are brilliant. I’m so lucky that they’re the people that I started DEVO with. Jerry is a conceptualist, though. He thinks his art and so it doesn’t really manifest itself physically. I’m more of a guy who has to make something every day. I don’t know what the difference is, but it is a difference in styling. So it could happen.

On one level, we’ve made jokes like, “What if DEVO did an A.I. album and advertised it that way?” But we should have done that a year ago if we were going to do that idea. I’m sure there’s probably a dozen people – 100, 200 people – doing A.I. albums like that right now. But it’s like, how necessary are albums anymore?

Also, when you talk about DEVO going out and playing now or making an album, whether we like it or not, we’ve been around 50 years. What is lucky for us about what we do is that our message actually resonates. For the majority of bands from the time period when we were starting, and before us, rock and roll in general was about sex, drugs, rock and roll… and that was it. Politics had no meaning or purpose. There was no thinking about life other than as a party, or giving people an escape from some reality so that they could go to Kmart and then not drive their car through the wall when they got there.

I mean, that’s what it was for me when I was a kid. I remember when I first heard the Beatles and the Stones; everything meant so much to me. It was so important; every little thing. I’d look at every detail on a single sleeve or an album cover, and read every word that Andrew Loog Oldham wrote. I’d read that and go, “Well, he just doesn’t make [sense]. I guess he’s a beatnik. I’m not sure.” But I was putting meaning into every single thing I saw or heard. And that was important to help me keep from going crazy in Akron, Ohio, back in 1966. And music still does that.

My kids, I never pushed them into listening to anything in particular; I didn’t want to do that to them. So they went through their periods of liking [different things]. My one daughter now, she’s in college, but she likes K-pop. To me, there are some elements of it that I find interesting, but for the most part, it doesn’t apply to me. But it applies to a certain age group. When your brain’s developing, it’s just like a piece of bubble gum.

The thing that’s interesting about DEVO is that we have a message that does relate better than a lot of things that [other] bands have to say. And we’re in an interesting time. It kind of reflects what was going on in the ‘70s when punk and new wave were happening, in response to what was happening politically around the world. We were 50 or 60 years at post-Dada, Bauhaus and futurists and ballet mécanique and that kind of music from the ‘20s. And I remember in the ‘60s reading about those movements and thinking, “I wish I was born so I could be around in the ‘20s; I wish I could have been in Berlin and Paris back then. That was the best time in the world!” I was thinking, “This just sucks now.”

I hear kids say that this time sucks, but, you know, it does. It sucks. But these cycles happen. And what happens in a time like where we are right now, I feel like it’s going to be inspirational. Because first off, technology has taken this incredible leap; they have tools that you and I didn’t have. You had to learn how to play that bass and that guitar. Today, a junior-high kid could be walking home from school and could be going, “Bom, bom, bom” into their phone. And then they can turn that into [something]. They could say, “Okay, I want that to sound like the bass from Foo Fighters… no, I want it to sound like Paul McCartney playing a Hofner.” They can do all that kind of stuff. And to me, they’re not losing something; they’ve gained something. They can sit there and go “Boom bop,” they can do a drumbeat and a bass line, and they don’t even have to own [those instruments].

[Some readers] might be old enough to remember your parents yelling down into the basement, “Stop playing that noise!” But now they don’t even have to think about that. They’ve got this incredible power to be an artist. I would love to be 16 right now and be inspired to write music. It would be such a wonderful time to be alive and doing that.

It’s inspiring to hear an artist speak that way. Because a lot of them are sort of, you know, “Shake fist at cloud” at the encroachment of A.I. And while there are very valid arguments to support that perspective, these are tools like anything else. It’s all how they’re used.

You can use it well or poorly, and it’s [always] been that way. As humans, we’re defective. We have this ability to come up with things like plastic. And plastic can be so amazing: you’re carrying your water around with you. You do all these things with plastic, all the things you could make. But you don’t want to eat plastic. You don’t want to fill the oceans with it. And we’re doing that in our bloodstreams now. So I think what could happen with kids now is that they could understand that there’s a responsibility that comes with the wonderful and insane parts of the human brain. What they need to figure out is how to juggle that stuff.

When I was a kid, it was simpler. You’d read a book like Population Bomb. Sociologists would say, “At the rate humans are expanding, we will have devoured everything on the planet by the year 2050. And planet Earth, to save itself, will have to develop a virus to kill off humans and save all the other species.” I remember reading that and thinking, “I’m never going to have kids because of that.”

And I almost didn’t have kids. It’s lucky for me that my wife said, “I know you don’t want to bring kids onto the planet, but what if we adopted kids that were already here?” And I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t think of that!” I’m a selfish, egotistical artist; why would I think about that? But it turned out to be the most amazing thing in my life, so I’m lucky that she did that. These kids that I have are incredible. And they teach me so much all the time.

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