Full Description
Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.
Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devo's last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts from the band and musical analysis set against an examination of new wave's emergence, the first-ever authorized book about Devo (with a foreword by Portlandia's Fred Armisen) explores the group's peak of success, when their hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, and plenty of misunderstandings. "Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence-it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number," says Casale. "It's where everything changes."
Contents
Foreword by Fred Armisen
Introduction
1. Girl U Want
Look at you with your mouth waterin', look at you with your mind spinnin'. Why don't we just admit it's all over?
2. It's Not Right
I sit around in a trance all day and think about you all the time.
3. Whip It
Go forward, move ahead, try to detect it, it's not too late.
4. Snowball
Like a snowball grows, until it gets too big. Until she lost control. And it rolled back down.
5. Ton O' Love
Take your turn, now make your move. Crush that doubt with a ton o' love.
6. Freedom of Choice
Freedom of choice is what you got, freedom from choice is what you want.
7. Gates of Steel
Half a goon and half a God, a man's not made of steel.
8. Cold War
I owe you absolutely nothing.
9. Don't You Know
I got a rocket in my pocket, but I don't know what to do.
10. That's Pep!
Vigor, vim, vitality and punch.
11. Mr. B's Ballroom
Yellin', laughin' tryin' hard to act smart, we put 'em under pressure and you watch them fall apart.
12. Planet Earth
Planet Earth, it's a place to live your life.
Acknowledgments
Notes
