Are they not kids?

As my mom pulled into our driveway that evening, she slowly shook her lowered head in disgust. “Oh no,” she moaned. I could no longer see her face in the rearview mirror from the back seat with my younger sister. Her hands still clutched the steering wheel long after the car came to a stop—she’d just witnessed the death of music.

In late August 1980, my mom, sister and I heard “Whip It” by Devo for the first time—a strange and exciting moment. Crispy synthetic warbles and bleeps clashed with a 6/4 disco drum groove, a Nashville-inspired guitar lick and a whiny guy who sang about breaking your momma’s back.

New Untraditional

It was the end for mom but the start of a new world of music for Donna and me. And when we saw the red flowerpots (OK, energy domes) on their heads, we knew there was something incredibly wrong but so right about Devo.

Their imagery intrigued at the same time as it disturbed. I caught a late-night broadcast of a Devo concert that featured band mascot Booji Boy—actually lead singer and art director Mark Mothersbaugh wearing a baby mask—reaching from his playpen to stick a fork into a nearby toaster. Devo’s deadpan spud boy humor was a bit above my head when I was 9.\

We Were Devo

But bits and pieces of older Devo songs still became enmeshed in the silly everyday dialogue between my sister and me. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, y y y y y y y yeah” from “Uncontrollable Urge” and “We are Devo, D-E-V-O” from “Jocko Homo” were parts of our lives, even though we weren’t even familiar with those songs. We just got a big kick out of the goofiness. “Through Being Cool,” from New Traditionalists, remains one of my favorite tunes.

After meeting Mothersbaugh in 1999 at a New York City music industry conference, I went through a long phase of Devolution, which included buying and downloading lots of Devo music and discovering the singer’s talent as a composer of film and television scores.

Devolution 2.0

And now, Devo is in my life again. The Spud Boys have just released Something for Everybody on Warner Bros. and replaced the energy domes with the Everybody Mask in order to obscure petty differences. But the reconnection goes much deeper than that.

Mothersbaugh teaches my children how to draw. He’s one of the main characters on Nick Jr’s Yo Gabba Gabba, a children’s television program my kids love. They get a kick out watching his pictures come to life at the end of the Mark’s Magic Pictures segment. So 30 years after my introduction to the world of Devo, my kids have become honorary spuds; and that’s good.