Whiplash

The evolution of Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh

In 1973, Oscar Kiss Maerth wrote a book called The Beginning Was the End: Knowledge Can Be Eaten, which detailed his theory that human beings began their ascent to the top of the food chain as an aggressive, cannibalistic order of apes more than a million years ago. According to Maerth, our ancestral apes ate the brains of other apes, which resulted in heightened libido and mental acumen due to the large amounts of protein in brains. Eventually, this dominant breed of cannibal ape mutated into what we now call Homo Sapiens.

However, as the human species rapidly evolved intellectually, it lost its primal instincts, or extra sensory perceptions. Humans became very skilled at the game of survival, but at the cost of separating themselves from the natural world around them. Rather than evolving, Maerth proposed that humans are perhaps de-evolving.

So, after reading Maerth’s book in the early ‘70s, band mates Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh adopted the name Devo for their group. Maerth’s ideas meshed with their own perceptions of American society as a rigid, robotic herd of conformist creatures merely focused on the mundane efficiency of survival.

But the group didn’t take their musical aspirations too seriously until Casale witnessed two friends get murdered by National Guard troops at the infamous Kent State massacre in 1970. De-evolution had gone far enough. It was time to make some noise. The rest is pop music history. If you’ve never heard of Devo’s 1980 hit “Whip It,” welcome back from your coma. We chatted with vocalist Mark Mothersbaugh about the current state of Devo and his media company Mutato Muzika, which produces music for films, videogames, commercials and, of course, Devo.

The Wave: What’s happening at Mutato Muzika these days?
Mark Mothersbaugh: Well, Barry Levinson is coming over today. We’re working on a film for him with Jack Black, Ben Stiller and Christopher Walken.

TW: How does the process of scoring a movie work? Do you get a script first, or do you watch rough cuts of the film?
MM: It depends on the director. Usually, you get a movie that’s almost finished so you can start thinking about it.

TW: You’ve scored all of Wes Anderson’s movies, right? (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums)
MM: Yeah. He’s a bit different.
In fact, he just gave me a script that’s not even a final draft yet. We’ll talk about music and I’ll send him music while he’s writing.

TW: To some fans, the idea that Devo makes music for commercials might seem incongruous to its earlier ideals. How do you regard it?
MM: I don’t see that as the case at all. It’s just a case of we’re in the world and we have the opportunity to be more subversive if we want to. The one good thing about commercials is that it’s a nice place to experiment. They’re anonymous. It’s not like that on an album or film. You can take chances in commercials and experiment in areas that people won’t let you in an album. You get pigeonholed right away. They want to see linear thought in a fashion that they can follow. Experimentation is often attacked.

TW: How do you define subversiveness?
MM: To have an effect on people without them knowing it.

TW: Did Devo have groupies?
MM: Of course.

TW: Any future Devo shows in development?
MM: Well, we just played some shows with Tony Hawk this month. We get asked all the time, but we rarely do it because we’ve got enough other things going on. But when something really interests us, we go out and do it.

TW: What’s the last book you read?
MM: Everything Is Illuminated. I was a little upset with it because it starts off extremely funny and it’s funny for about three-fourths of the way, but by the end it gets horrifying.

TW: What’s the most peculiar phenomenon in pop culture today?
MM: The passivity of consumers and their general disinterest in thinking about things for themselves, or their lack of being proactive about the kinds of entertainment they’re subjected to.

TW: How do you define art?
MM: There’s no one definition, but I can tell you how it works for me. It’s usually an attempt to explain the phenomena of the human condition.

TW: What’s your strangest hobby?
MM: I collect different things. I used to be a chronic collector. To get over it, I have become a collector of things for other people. I encourage their collections. About ten or fifteen years ago, I probably had the largest collection of Mao Tse-Tung pins in the U.S. My biggest hobby though is this stream of consciousness diary I’ve been doing every day for about 30 years on postcards. I’ll write and do paintings, collages and sketches. The one thing that’s common is that I only do them on postcards that are 6” x 4” or smaller. When I get enough of them, I fill up an album with a hundred of them. I now have over 200 albums.

TW: What’s the strangest fan letter you’ve received?
MM: We’ve gotten a lot of weird ones because Devo always attracted strange people. Some people became genetic engineers simply because of Devo. I’ve written songs about DNA and people have written to tell me they’re graduating from Harvard with a
degree in genetic engineering because of my music.

TW: How do you define an “evildoer?”
MM: Other than a lot of them are in power, I think you can find a lot of them lurking around as conspicuous consumers and they’re usually religious.

TW: What’s the best Devo cover you’ve ever heard?
MM: Most of them aren’t that good,
but I like the Del Rubio Triplets doing “Whip It.” They were three old women in their 70s when they recorded it. They played it with three acoustic guitars and three voices. They turned it into an opus where they had this big, long break in the middle – they started shouting out stuff and they built it into a frenzy and they’re banging on the backs of their guitars. They did it all in one take. No overdubbing.

TW: What musicians are you into these days?
MM: I like this band from France called Stereo Total. They remind me of Devo when we were still back in Ohio and it was crazy and things were less calculated. There’s a guy named Glen Meadmore that’s pretty funny. He makes kind of punk-hillbilly-O Brother Where Art Thou-gay music.