Devo, the 2025 documentary by Chris Smith, is an interesting contradiction, much like the band at its center.
Devo—formed by Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh, along with their respective brothers, Bob Casale and Bob Mothersbaugh, and Alan Myers—have existed under a gloss of red energy domes, matching outfits and the Top 20 success of 1980’s “Whip It.”
But peel away just a slight bit of the plastic cover, and you find 45 years of misconceptions. Devo wasn’t just a handful of new wave weirdos who dressed funny, but artists worried about the proliferation of gleeful, self-inflicted intellectual degradation, the “de-evolution” of society to where no one thinks anymore, and gee, isn’t that swell?
Dig even a little deeper, as does the documentary, and you’ll discover that Devo was initially a reaction to trauma and tragedy. Both Gerald and Mark attended Kent State University when, on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired upon anti-war protesters, killing four.
“I thought the worst part of my life would be Nixon and the killings at Kent State,” Gerald Casale tells Treble. “I thought that would be the worst part of my young life. And then in my golden years, I could relax.”
But looking upon the current political landscape, Casale is taken back to the authoritarian 1970s, except this time, it’s worse. “This is it, man,” he says. “The final act is cruelty, and I’m now too old to do much about it.”
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
“Why would anybody even be interested in this doc right now? It’s only because of the concepts and ideas that we pursued that are having some kind of resonance now,” remarks Casale. Devo and its message, he observes, “withstood the test of time.”
“It certainly isn’t because we were Elton John and sold a hundred million records and had 20 number one hits,” adds Casale. “It’s the opposite, actually. In this sea of stuff, that’s mostly meaningless. There was this band that actually were agit-pop artists.”
This new Devo doc shows the formation of these artists. Perhaps the most significant highlight of the new documentary is seeing footage of Devo’s first-ever show. It showed that Devo knew it had something worth saving. “It was all talked out,” Gerald tells Treble. “We had a plan.”
And there lies another contradiction. Yes, Devo had a plan. Yes, Devo had a vision. Yes, Devo considered undergoing plastic surgery, so the members all looked the same, pushing the “anti-conformity through conformity” message to its extreme.
But Devo also knew its limits. They were artists, first and foremost. When asked if Devo felt the weight of saving humanity from itself, Gerald says, “Not really.”
“There was a certain amount of fun and satire,” he says, “and I always hoped, of course, that the total package—the message, the sounds, the presentation, visually—would be enough to actually put us over the hump and make us mainstream.”
“Like some snarky critic in 1978 at the Melody Maker magazine in London said, ‘Oh, these guys are just the thinking man’s KISS.’ And at the time I thought, ‘what the hell?’ I was so offended and so bummed out,” says Gerald, “and then 20 years later I went, what if we really could have been the thinking man’s KISS?”
“That means we would be as in your face as they are in the media and selling as many records and as successful and with our message instead of the stupid message of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”
What a beautiful world we’d live in if such were the case. The closest that Devo came to becoming mainstream came in 1980 with Freedom of Choice’s second single: “Whip It.” With its irresistible synth riff and seemingly nonsensical lyrics, “Whip It” became a surprise dance hit. The song reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.
“We were not thinking about money and hits, clearly,” said Gerald. “That’s pretty obvious. Suddenly, when it became profitable and it got rewarded financially, it’s like, ‘wow, okay.’ But that’s also when the problems start.”
Devo does address that balance between art and commerce, and the delicate dance of selling out. One scene details the mail-order catalog that came with copies of New Traditionalists, and how Neil Young—one of Devo’s earliest supporters—called them out on it.
“We were having our cake and eating it too,” says Casale. “We were making fun of all the mass marketing schemes applied to pop music. But we were doing it—the content was skewed, twisted and original. No merchandiser would help us because the things that we wanted to offer weren’t easily mass-produced. It was all custom, so we had to pay for it. And we weren’t making any money in the end.”
Again, a very relevant sentiment to the modern day. “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” as they say. A new amended version could be, “The more things change, the more Devo was right.“
And viewers will leave the new DEVO doc thinking that this band predicted all this. But what they won’t know is that the band still carried on.
DEVO glosses over everything from 1982’s Oh, No! It’s Devo. The film barely touches upon Shout, the album that got them dropped from Warner Brothers, nor does it address the two albums on Enigma, Total Devo and Smooth Noodle Maps. It doesn’t reference 2010’s Something for Everybody, the band’s first studio album after twenty years, the band’s approach to making it or the 360-degree video for “What We Do.”
The film ends with a focus on Mark Mothersbaugh’s burgeoning career as a film and television composer and on Gerald Casale’s directorial work; he’d lay the foundation for today’s abstract advertising culture by helming a series of Devo-esque commercials, while also directing videos for Foo Fighters (“I’ll Stick Around”), Soundgarden (“Blow Up the Outside World”), Hum (“Green To Me”), and A Perfect Circle (“Imagine”).
“An honest Devo documentary, which would’ve been far more interesting, would have shown better performances, shown big pieces of our videos with us talking about the making of those videos,” remarks Casale. “It would’ve been better to do it as a mini-series, like a four-part mini-series.”
“It’s all about perception,” he adds. “When they hear the word documentary, for some reason, they think this is ‘the truth,’ when really, it is one man’s point of view. With some good editors, you could take all the raw content that Chris Smith had at his disposal, give it to ten directors, and you would get ten documentaries that were so different, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“And that to me would’ve been wonderful,” he added. “That would’ve been like, Rashomon. Give it to five people and let’s have five [documentaries] out at once.”
Devo has struggled with perception from its inception. One of the phrases circulating about the new documentary is that they’re “the most misunderstood band on the planet,” and while Devo will clear up some confusion, it still leaves a lot unsaid.
“It should have been an open-ended ending rather than putting it in this lock box of history,” he remarks.
Thankfully, Gerald Casale is not going quietly into that good night. Devo embarks on the “Cosmic De-Evolution Tour” with The B-52s this month. Casale himself says he has “an album’s worth” of solo material that he needs to finish. In 2021, Casale released an expanded version of 2006’s Mine is Not a Holy War, the first album by Jihad Jerry and the Evil Doers, the group he formed in response to George W. Bush’s War on Terror.
He promises to be as poignant and political on this new release. “The main song is a suite. It’s about seven minutes long, and it’s called ‘Wetiko,’” he shares. “And you can look up the meaning of that. And it comes from about 150 years ago. Native Americans came up with that word to describe their horror at white settlers. They thought their aggressive greed was actually a disease.”
When I first spoke with Casale in 2022, DEVO was shortlisted for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the time, it seemed like mainstream was finally starting to catch on to Devo.
This was not just a band of weirdly dressed art-rock nerds who thought they were smarter than everyone. Devo wasn’t just the “thinking man’s KISS.” Devo was for everyone. This band deconstructed norms when those norms became oppressive, not just to them but to the public at large.
Sadly, Devo remains misunderstood. And out of the Rock Hall: though nominated, they didn’t get in. Perhaps, this new documentary will be the push they need.
If anything, it sheds light on this group of spuds and mutants.
“That preceded Devo,” says Casale about the use of “spud” in the band’s lore. “That was a favorite go-to kind of metaphor for the common man that my friend Bob Lewis—a poet and an A+ academic student at Kent— and I were formulating ideas. There was no band, there was no musical application. There were writings, and I was doing DEVO art, and spuds were the image.”
“They’re undervalued, they’re not pretty, but they were absolutely necessary to the survival of whole civilizations,” said Casale. “And so ‘spud’ was a term of endearment, not just put down that you’re a spud. They were bad spuds, but there were good spuds.”
And Casale remains a good spud. “Trying to be,” he says, with a nod.
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