DEVO HAVE MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT THE FUTURE

For 20 years Mark Mothersbaugh has been scoring Wes Anderson films, Apple commercials, kids’ TV shows, and video games, but before that he used to be in this band called DEVO. They wore funny hats called energy domes, wrote funny songs about whipping, and made up silly films to go along with them. The world adored them. Then they went away. Then a while ago they came back and now they’ve got a new album. I wanted to ask the singer why their energy domes have turned blue, so I went to meet him.

Vice: Hey Mark, have we stopped de-evolving yet?
Mark Mothersbaugh: Absolutely not. We’re accelerating at a rate that is astounding and frightening. I never in my most paranoid moments back in the 70s–back when Jerry and I were going, “Yeah, we think things are de-evolving not evolving”–thought it would be this bad.

You were pretty pro-Obama. Has his election helped slow de-evolution?
I don’t know, I would like to say yes, but maybe I was wishing for a miracle too. He works and exists in a den of thieves, so it’s almost like it doesn’t matter who’s on top. It’s like a film. Films aren’t the same as they used to be. Now there’s so many people involved; you can have a director, and they could be totally wrong and make a mistake, but there are so many people and checks and balances that they make him basically ineffective, or not much more than a figurehead. DEVO has a natural urge to be optimistic about things, but we also worry.

When you do the math, you realize we have the same problem we had 40-50 years ago–it’s that humans have done an incredible job of over-surviving. We’ve managed to survive past the point where it’s good for our species–definitely not good for a lot of other species. I support a lot of causes and want to protect wildlife but in reality, what’s really going to happen is the planet is going to change, and humans are changing it, and polar bears and walruses and elephants and baboons and animals living in the wild–there’s not going to be space for them anymore.

The other possibility is that humans will be culled–either by ourselves or naturally. All of a sudden everyone will go, “What are we thinking? There’s only so much air, there’s only so much water, so much land.” Just ease up on procreation a little bit. Six billion people is great, but not all at once. It’s too many for the size of the planet we have. Either we decide this ourselves or maybe mother nature will step in and remove a billion–which could happen. The pandemic scenario is more realistic than ever, and everything is shared. There are very few pockets of humans that are isolated from the rest of the world. Everybody’s in the same septic tank, so if the right epidemic comes along, it could just get a good roll on before somebody figures out what the antibiotic is that will make it go away.

Would you suggest we colonize the Moon or Mars so we don’t keep all our eggs in the same basket?
I think that was what allowed intellectuals at one time to go, “Oh yeah, we’ll figure it out, there’s always Mars, there’s always the Moon,” but the reality is that there just isn’t the technology to do that in the foreseeable future. All the religions of the world are pumping out kids and encouraging everybody–especially those that have nothing, who most need to preserve their resources–they’re encouraging them to pump out more humans like there was no tomorrow. And I guess there might be no tomorrow if they continue.

You pre-released your first album in 20 years on www.colbertnation.com–were you making a political statement?
We’re fans of the show; we’re not apolitical. I think when I met Jerry we were both protesting the war in Vietnam and thought that the way to affect change was to hold up a sign and make your voice known, but one of the lessons we learned when we were younger was that rebellion was obsolete in our culture. The hippies of the 60s became the hip capitalists of the 70s and the nihilist punks overdosed and went away, and we were looking around and deciding the way to affect change in this culture was through subversion rather than rebellion. I remember I was influenced by a Burger King commercial at the time and ended up repeating the lyrics to it on our first album on a song called “Too Much Paranoia.” I thought Madison Avenue were really good at subversion, they just sold bad shit most of the time. We thought we could use their techniques, not necessarily their politics–so I think DEVO have always had a political interest.

Do you think my generation has a reason to be inspired to be artists?
I think there’s a lot of reasons to be inspired to be an artist and to have a viewpoint about life. Even after 20-some years of grunge music and rap that makes people feel like they have no purpose and that what they think doesn’t matter, I think there’s still plenty of things to be hopeful about and plenty of reasons to want to create change and to want to be part of a positive future.

Fuck the epidemic thing, let’s try something else–maybe we just need to re-define what being human is. I know we’ve just talked about everything negative and the direction the planet’s going in, but at the same time I think now might be a really great time to be an artist and to be a kid.

When I was young I looked at bands and thought, “How do you record an album? How do you get a record deal? What are those things?” And now kids can record music on their phones–it’s a pretty exciting time to be alive. I’ve just signed a record deal with a record company, and that is something I could never imagine doing three years ago. We got talked into it after we met with people and they said, “We’ll either be gone in five years time, or maybe somehow we could reinvent ourselves and make ourselves relevant again,” so they were open to suggestions. They were like, “What can we do?” and I was like, “Okay, that makes that sound a lot more fun than the first time around, when they would say ‘this is how it works in the record business and this is what you do, and I don’t wanna hear any more shit about Broadway or art books or art projects, just make a hit.’”

So what revolutionary ideas are you employing on this record?
Just the idea of employing an ad agency to take over marketing instead of letting Warner Brothers do it; I think that’s kind of a big thing. We’ve been doing things with focus groups, that’s the reason the energy domes are blue, the focus group decided it. Thirty years ago there’s no way we could’ve done something like that, because we just felt totally misunderstood. The press didn’t get it back then. With every album we were trying to prove ourselves again. With our first album Rolling Stone said things like, “…and there’s even two songs on the record that don’t have guitar. You call that rock ‘n roll?” The next album we got attacked for having a drum machine, so we became very insular and protective, and that’s why we made our own films.

Years later, when MTV showed up, then bands like Rod Stewart and Nirvana, who didn’t know what to do, their record companies went and hired directors to come up with jazzy ideas for music videos; the band would go, “Hmm, I want a horse in my video,” and they’d go, ‘”OK, you can have a horse.” They’d spend lots of money on lots of stupid videos, like baby pictures for record companies. They were mindless and had nothing to do with what we thought Sound and Vision was going to be.

Any predictions we had were right on the money, like talking about music television back in the early 70s saying, “It’s going to change everything,” that was kind of correct, but it didn’t kill rock n’ roll, which we thought it would. I thought, “Rock n’ roll will be over and Sound and Vision is going to create this whole new idea of what pop music and pop art is and all the guitar bands will just go under, but the reality is that the guitar bands hired ad agencies to make their own baby pictures, so they managed to survive quite well.

What do you think of music videos as they are now? Are you into Lady Gaga’s stuff?
It’s not impressive or anything. I like Lady Gaga, and I didn’t at first, and then I met her and went to one of her shows and thought, “Well, she’s a kid, she’s pretty talented; she played piano and she really sang, and she does write these songs.” She’s not David Bowie when he was 22, but she’s pretty darn talented, and she’s pretty smart and she’s got handlers that really keep her pointed in the right direction. She’s obviously a corporate product that is being pushed along in this direction because they’re making millions and millions off of her right now, but I think they’ve hired really great video people to work with her and her show is really good. I think she could be somebody who by the time she reaches 30, she’s either going to be really jaded, fucked up, a jerk, or she could be a really great artist–I’m hoping that her legacy is as a really great artist.

What kind of direction are you going to take with your new “music films” then?
YouTube is closer to what I was hoping for when I was thinking of Sound and Vision and MTV. I think what it does is take away the idea of Michael Jackson. Everybody loved “Thriller” because he spent 150 million on it, which was unheard of at the time. John Landis, a famous director, did it and they had a cast of hundreds in the video. That’s all well and great, and epic videos are cool, but I think the coolest stuff is what people do when they just have an idea that’s so good that you could shoot it on a stupid flip cam in your bedroom and all of a sudden you get 600,000 hits in a week. That’s real art, and it’s creative, instead of something that’s been pushed down your throat by a record company or a sponsor. It’s better than Madison Avenue. I love YouTube for that.

So are you going to go lo-fi over choosing a famous director to work with?
Well the stuff we’ve been doing with Mother–we’ve shot an “unreal reality” show with them–it’s kind of unreal. I think the only real thing in it is us. It’s going to come out on the internet. I really like it. We’re definitely making art right now and I’m having a lot of fun with that. You don’t have to have John Landis or a a quarter of a million to make a really good video, you just have to have a great idea and be creative and have some sort of a talent. There’s an audience that’s available with hungry eyes and hungry young minds that are searching through the internet, that big septic tank full of shit, looking for great things. When somebody finds something good, they will let everybody else know.

I think the really best stuff on the internet isn’t a secret. The really best stuff does get seen. I think the internet is the most positive thing that’s happened in your lifetime. It’s the closest thing to democracy that’s ever existed in human civilization. Now we have to wait for whatever nation it’s going to be that will manage to send a laser into space and knock out every satellite, and then none of us will have any of our photos anymore, or anything that we have written or recorded or transmitted to anyone else, and it will all be gone in one instant. But until that happens, we can all watch YouTube.

www.clubdevo.com

WORDS: NICOLE KAI
PHOTOS: JAMIE LEE CURITS TAETE