Let's Talk About Devo’s Anti-Romney Song, “Don’t Roof Rack Me, Bro”

If you’re anything like me, you no doubt waited patiently in line at your local record hop on July 15, 2010 in order to get your copy of Devo’s latest album Something For Everybody as early as possible, along with millions of other music buying Americans. If you did, you were no doubt entranced by some nice glossy album art and some very pretty blue vinyl, marveled at how Bob 1’s voice sounds exactly the same, and may have very well enjoyed an album that fit snugly in between 1981’s New Traditionalists and 1982’s Oh, No! It’s Devo in terms of listenability. For me personally they’ve never attained the sheer perfection of their debut (which I’ve always grouped with similarly perfect New Wave debut albums released by Warner Bros around the same time, with The B-52’s self titled, and Oingo Boingo’s Only a Lad before all three bands saw less than promising returns with every subsequent effort) The album stands as a nice testament to just how far a little direction from Brian Eno can go.

Because Devo always works best with a little bit of direction, and their first stand alone single since the 2010 album is particularly a case in point. Normally one would look to Mark Motherbaugh for some of this essential guidance, but since we can see his time being split from being the brains behind Mutato Muzika, as well as occasional scoring for Wes Anderson, the reigns have been slipping lately into the hands of Gerald Casale: user of questionable basses and (as far as the album cover of Total Devo is concerned) a wearer of questionable ponytails. This is quite frequently a bit of a shame, since Casale (the conceiver and pusher of the band’s initial concept of De-evolution, and essentially co-frontman) is usually the idea first, music second kind of guy. This has consequently lead to many of the bands often somewhat dumb message songs as well as some of their worst tracks including, “Clockout," “Ton O’ Luv," and most recently “Don’t Roof Rack Me, Bro (Seamus Unleashed)."

When news of the song first hit me, it was coupled with a video of Gerald Casale using an Obama vs Romney = Coke vs Pepsi analogy. This irked me just a tad since I made the exact same point (and a little better, I might add) in a thankfully never published Addicting Info piece. But I was even more severely irked that Casale, let alone anyone, felt that the issue of Mitt Romney’s dog being tied to the roof of a car 30 odd years ago, not only merited further discussion, but deserved to be immortalized in song. This is most certainly, unabashedly, a bona fide bad idea.

First, let’s try to withhold our remarks on the fact that the song contains a reference to the phrase “Don’t Taze Me, Bro!”, which is a line not really worth quoting once, let alone TWICE in two different songs. But when you initially play the song, we’re not off to such a shaky start. It begins with a some fairly riff heavy Bob 1 guitar work, which is usually what I like in a Devo number, but things fall apart quickly from there as soon as the lyrics hit, especially the first verse. “Seamus, Seamus please come back, you former master is on the attack/ if he was honest and told the truth, he’d go to jail for what he did to you.” The second verse is just a slightly rearranged rendition of the first, the riff repeats and we keep returning to the particularly clunky chorus until the song mercifully ends at a scant 3:10. Make no mistake, I’m by no means a Mitt supporter, and I’m sure when the rest of the “boys” in the band shrugged indifferently to the concept of the song, they didn’t think they were engaging in any kind of real biting commentary, but this isn’t even very funny. Which makes one wonder why does it even exist?

It seems like we’re once again attempting to return to the enclave of humorous cynicism that so many of us jaded nerds (and in the case of Devo, aged jaded nerds) keep taking refuge in. If you wanted to theoretically write a song about the upcoming election, it’s not as if you can toss out a blatantly pro-Obama diddy and call it a day, nor could you really have the time to lay out a song that documents a detailed history of Mitt Romney’s shady financial dealings, so what we’re left with is a song about a dog getting tied to the roof of a car, that you can always write off as just a joke, and (if you’ll pardon my candor) I don’t think I like it very much.

If only Gerald Casale had stuck with Jihad Jerry & the Evil Doers, maybe he would have had time to hone this idea on his own into something a little less embarrassing, but the song is out now for all eternity and it’s done the near impossible by managing to get a few people to listen to a new Devo song, and it barely even has any synth in it!