More than 50 years ago, Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale met as students at Kent State. Both visual artists, they formed the new wave band Devo with a message of cultural de-evolution, manifesting in an instantly recognizable blend of absurdity, sardonic humor and sci-fi aesthetics.
“We saw ourselves as multimedia artists,” Mothersbaugh told GBH’s The Culture Show. “We were thinking, it’s the mid-’70s; rock and roll has got to be over by now. There’s no new ideas showing up, and so we were taking cues from all of the art movements in Europe between the ’20s and ’30s.”
What Devo was singing about back then — consumerism , corporate overlords, conformity — resonates just as deeply with listeners today. The band is now on their anniversary tour “50 Years of De-Evolution… Continued!”
“It’s kind of interesting to become a legacy band,” Mothersbaugh said. “The world could have changed, but the world kind of went exactly as we feared. We were hoping we were paranoid, but it turned out we were optimists.”
“I’ve often jokingly said that we’re like the house band on the Titanic at this point,” laughed Casale. “De-evolution — those ideas and our music — is not polarizing. It withstood the test of time, and now everybody agrees that de-evolution is real. And so there’s more of a three-generation party coming to our shows now, you know? We’re the new wave Grateful Dead where we have 20-somethings, 50-somethings, and 70-somethings in the audience.”
Devo’s tour comes to Boston on May 9 at MGM Music Hall in Fenway. For more information, or to secure your tickets, head to livenation.com.
