{"id":31095,"date":"2026-06-03T05:30:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T09:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=31095"},"modified":"2026-06-04T06:35:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T10:35:59","slug":"devos-duty-now-for-the-future-mutate-dont-stagnate-part-2-of-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/03\/devos-duty-now-for-the-future-mutate-dont-stagnate-part-2-of-4\/","title":{"rendered":"DEVO\u2019s Duty Now for the Future: Mutate, Don\u2019t Stagnate (Part 2 of 4)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"After a 10-year hiatus, DEVO came back in the \u201890s, and the band has been active ever since. The last studio album was Something for Everybody<\/i>. 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\u2019s still rattling around in your heads as a possibility for the future?<\/b><\/p>\n

Mark Mothersbaugh:<\/b> We talk about it. I\u2019m at a recording studio now; I score here every day. I write music, and I\u2019ve been here for 35 years. And Bob Mothersbaugh is downstairs; I\u2019m not sure what he\u2019s doing right now, but we talk about it, and we end up writing. Bob and I recently wrote a song for Plankton: The Movie<\/i>. And I\u2019m doing something with Jack Black later this year for another Minecraft<\/i> movie, I think. So we still record stuff here.<\/p>\n

As far as DEVO doing things, I would be tickled. I\u2019ve got a lot of music and a lot of lyrics. And it\u2019s complicated to be an artist working with other artists. Jerry and Bob are brilliant. I\u2019m so lucky that they\u2019re the people that I started DEVO with. Jerry is a conceptualist, though. He thinks<\/i> his art and so it doesn\u2019t really manifest itself physically. I\u2019m more of a guy who has to make something every day. I don\u2019t know what the difference is, but it is<\/i> a difference in styling. So it could happen.<\/p>\n

On one level, we\u2019ve made jokes like, \u201cWhat if DEVO did an A.I. album and advertised it that way?\u201d But we should have done that a year ago if we were going to do that idea. I\u2019m sure there\u2019s probably a dozen people \u2013 100, 200 people \u2013 doing A.I. albums like that right now. But it\u2019s like, how necessary are albums anymore?<\/p>\n

Also, when you talk about DEVO going out and playing now or making an album, whether we like it or not, we\u2019ve 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\u2026 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.<\/p>\n

I mean, that\u2019s 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\u2019d look at every detail on a single sleeve or an album cover, and read every word that Andrew Loog Oldham wrote. I\u2019d read that and go, \u201cWell, he just doesn\u2019t make [sense]. I guess he\u2019s a beatnik. I\u2019m not sure.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

My kids, I never pushed them into listening to anything in particular; I didn\u2019t want to do that to them. So they went through their periods of liking [different things]. My one daughter now, she\u2019s 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\u2019t apply to me. But it applies to a certain age group. When your brain\u2019s developing, it\u2019s just like a piece of bubble gum.<\/p>\n

The thing that\u2019s 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\u2019re in an interesting time. It kind of reflects what was going on in the \u201870s 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 m\u00e9canique<\/em> and that kind of music from the \u201820s. And I remember in the \u201860s reading about those movements and thinking, \u201cI wish I was born so I could be around in the \u201820s; I wish I could have been in Berlin and Paris back then. That was the best time in the world!\u201d I was thinking, \u201cThis just sucks now.\u201d<\/p>\n

I hear kids say that this<\/i> time sucks, but, you know, it does. It sucks<\/i>. But these cycles happen. And what happens in a time like where we are right now, I feel like it\u2019s going to be inspirational. Because first off, technology has taken this incredible leap; they have tools that you and I didn\u2019t 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, \u201cBom, bom, bom\u201d into their phone. And then they can turn that into [something]. They could say, \u201cOkay, I want that to sound like the bass from Foo Fighters\u2026 no, I want it to sound like Paul McCartney playing a Hofner.\u201d They can do all that kind of stuff. And to me, they\u2019re not losing something; they\u2019ve gained something. They can sit there and go \u201cBoom bop,\u201d they can do a drumbeat and a bass line, and they don\u2019t even have to own [those instruments].<\/p>\n

[Some readers] might be old enough to remember your parents yelling down into the basement, \u201cStop playing that noise!\u201d But now they don\u2019t even have to think about that. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s inspiring to hear an artist speak that way. Because a lot of them are sort of, you know, \u201cShake fist at cloud\u201d at the encroachment of A.I. And while there are very<\/i> valid arguments to support that perspective, these are tools like anything else. It\u2019s all how they\u2019re used. <\/b><\/p>\n

You can use it well or poorly, and it\u2019s [always] been that way. As humans, we\u2019re defective. We have this ability to come up with things like plastic. And plastic can be so amazing: you\u2019re carrying your water around with you. You do all these things with plastic, all the things you could make. But you don\u2019t want to eat plastic. You don\u2019t want to fill the oceans with it. And we\u2019re doing that in our bloodstreams now. So I think what could happen with kids now is that they could understand that there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

When I was a kid, it was simpler. You\u2019d read a book like Population Bomb<\/i>. Sociologists would say, \u201cAt 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.\u201d I remember reading that and thinking, \u201cI\u2019m never going to have kids because of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I almost didn\u2019t<\/i> have kids. It\u2019s lucky for me that my wife said, \u201cI know you don\u2019t want to bring kids onto the planet, but what if we adopted kids that were already here?\u201d And I\u2019m like, \u201cOh, I didn\u2019t think of that!\u201d I\u2019m 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\u2019m lucky that she did that. These kids that I have are incredible. And they teach me so much all the time.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a>\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… After a 10-year hiatus, DEVO came back in the \u201890s, and the band has been active ever since. The last studio album was Something for Everybody. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31103,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,50,59],"tags":[669,5909],"class_list":["post-31095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-new-wave","category-punk","tag-devo","tag-mark-mothersbaugh","cat-41-id","cat-50-id","cat-59-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31095"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31620,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31095\/revisions\/31620"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}