Devo: The Next Generation

While Devo may have started out as a cosmic conceptual snicker with subversive undertones, anyone who cared to look beyond the rubber suits and geometric hats may have realised these guys were more than just a joke. Now, like a phoenix rising from the flames of rock music, Devo have redeployed their considerable audio-visual skills and positioned themselves on the cutting edge of a new medium - CD-ROM. Pushing the expressive and technological boundaries of multimedia, as they did nearly two decades ago with music video, Gerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh have turned their talent for social satire into Devo Presents: The Adventures of the Smart Patrol , a hilarious commentary on the 'dumbing down' of a culture characterised by rampant corporatism and moral bankruptcy.  

Designed, written and directed by Casale and Mothersbaugh Devo Presents :The Adventures of the Smart Patrol is a satirical adventure set in the near future-present. The game deputizes players to combat a sinister power structure involved in a massive conspiracy: Big Entertainment, a monopoly entertainment company that owns all audio-visual sites, is in cahoots with Universal Health Systems, the monopoly health company,  in trying to suppress a cure for a crippling epidemic which affects one in every three people. In what sounds like a vintage Devo conceit the disease, Ossobucco Mialytis (OM) destroys its victims bone structure, turning them into a gelatinous mass. While the disease does not kill it makes movement impossible without various products from Universal Health Systems like OM pills, the exoskeleton that allows you to walk around, and the Universal Body Bag. For obvious reasons they are totally opposed to Lifeforms Unlimited, (a rogue recombinant DNA laboratory), creating a cure that will cost a nickel.

In the process of making the cure, LifeForms Unlimited accidentally make the recombinant DNA monster known as Turkey Monkey which has the head of a Rhesus monkey and the body of a plucked turkey.  When the game begins Turkey Monkey has been kidnapped from LifeForms Unlimited by a treacherous lab assistant paid by the lawyers at Big Entertainment who intend to release it to the Pilgrims, a right wing born-again Christian group with massive media clout. Wearing their trademark Pilgrim hats, they will go on the air with Turkey Monkey and use it to smear and ruin Life Forms Unlimited.

The heroes of the piece are the band The Smart Patrol, who as friends of Life Forms Unlimited, undertake to recapture Turkey Monkey.  In the first hour of game play Turkey Monkey escapes from the kidnappers so both the good guys and the bad guys are trying to find it.  If the good guys (you and the Smart Patrol) find it and get it back into the laboratory then Jeremy (one of the Smart Patrol afflicted with OM) can take the experimental cure and save Spudland from the Pilgrims.  If the bad guys get Turkey Monkey they will go on television, and then, like the Gestapo, round up the Smart Patrol and LifeForms Unlimited. 

The game is arranged in eight locations and takes place over a twelve hour slice of life.  In the beginning you are given an electric 'Spudmobile' which you can drive to any location in order to start the game.  You are also given a Spud gun which shoots a Teflon Net so you can capture Turkey Monkey, and 500 Two-bars, the currency of Spudland, which buys chargers for the car and tickets to Club Devo (where the Smart Patrol play their new song).  However, Turkey Monkey is carrying the disease and if you miss him he squirts, giving you stage one of OM. Every time you miss him you advance to another stage.  When you reach stage three of OM you have to go to The Golden Oasis Retirement Home for invalids where Devo, diseased, senile and wheelchair bound, attempt to play music. (Take heed Neil Young and the Rolling Stones.)

The game is structured so that no matter where you go in the eight locations you find out a piece of the story.  Action takes place in the 3-D rendered environment in which all the characters, (human actors shot on blue screen and transferred into 'sprite' by digitising and pixellating them) are totally interactive.  Because there is no Quicktime video the characters can talk to you and the outcome of your exchange will affect the outcome of a scene.  So you can either have the full experience of the game where you achieve the goal or you can fall into one of the alternative outcomes. There is, however, only one correct story ending that reveals the secret and transports you into the next dimension, the world of Booji Boy (whom Devo fans will remember as the infant stage persona from Beautiful World). This final point also works as the teaser for the next episode in 'The Adventures of the Smart Patrol'.

Combining art, technology, and politics, Devo has fully exploited the intertextual power of CD-ROM to create a game that is both visually arresting and challenging to play.  Making conceptual statements by taking on futuristic fatalism via science-oriented mutation Devo have located a newer, smarter medium in which to spout their trademark philosophy, the manifesto of 'de-evolution', which according to Casales, is the foundational element for anything Devo does. “It's kind of like the stock when you're cooking. Our stock is de-evolution."

For those of you who missed it the first time around 'de-evolution' doesn't actually have a dictionary definition.  It does however have a lot in common with Webster's second definition of 'devolution': "retrograde evolution; decay." It originated as Devo's immaculate conception way back in the early '70s; a handy catchphrase for the inevitable decline and fall of Western civilization as envisioned by avenging chem-lab egg-heads. Pointing to the follies of popular science, it focused on the way faulty human nature changes technological advances into state-of-the-art Frankensteins. 

"I guess some people saw it as a kind of smart ass sophomoric joke,” says Casales. “But for better or worse we really believed it.  And in the 20 years since we spewed it out, the culture showed us we were more accurate than we ever wanted to be.  It was supposed to be a joke and instead the idea of linear progress has completely crumbled and everyone can see that. There really has been a 'dumbing down' and a de-evolution of both the psychic and moral fabric in America."

Unlike many artists who label themselves 'avant-garde' Devo literally were ahead of their time. And not just in terms of heralding the end of modernist beliefs in progress, science and rationality. The way they expressed these ideas were in themselves essentially post-modern, before the term had even come into existence. "Yeah we were doing postmodern performance art before we had words for it" laughs Casale. "And it was always in a multimedia vein. It always had to do with pulling from pop culture, twisting meanings, reassembling things, using elements of both high and low art and doing some kind of truly synthetic recombinant hybrid. So now technology is finally available - its kind of sad because I wish CD-ROM technology had been around in 1974."

"Today's version of Devo would be renderers, programmers and hackers who would also have performing abilities and want to go on-stage. They would operate from a Web-site and be like guerrilla artists. In my own small way that's what I'm trying to get started with the Smart Patrol. I've got a group of 5 devolutionary type anti-heroes who can do this through me - I'm the puppeteer."

The Smart Patrol will, however, have a life of their own. The music from the CD-ROM will be released separately as regular CD because as Casale puts it "the audio on CD-ROM is so crummy". The new songs are written by Gerry & Mark, but performed by The Smart Patrol.  Of Smart Patrol performances he says "It will be like that scene in Wizard of Oz where we're really playin' it and someone will pull open the curtains and we'll say 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain’".

In effect what Devo is doing with The Smart Patrol is poking fun at the rock industry’s increasingly pathetic attempts as self-reinvention. Casale's longtime skepticism regarding the so-called rebelliousness of rock music can hardly be contained when he talks of the various ‘comebacks’ and relabelling of rock as ‘alternative’.  "Rebellion is a left over vestigial idea that they keep repackaging. Its part of the capitalist myth of freedom, that led people to believe that what they were doing is what they wanted to do." Dispensing with reinvention through hair, clothes or plastic surgery, Mothersbaugh and Casale have gone for the total  Frankenstein effect. They've created a whole new band who are, according to Casale, the Monkees to Devo's Beatles, “except they're Monkees with Brains”. Younger and better looking they are he says, "Devo:The Next Generation".  

Beyond this dig at Star Trek the really scary part about the whole futuristic aspect of Devo's music is that in hindsight so much of what they said has come true. While their music was audacious it was also as tellingly accurate as the best science fiction - especially when it came to the patenting of recombinant DNA for corporate profit. After years of foretelling of this exact eventuality, an ABC prime time documentary,The Gene Merchants (1984) detailed the growing corruption already rife in the fast-growing gene splicing industry; corporate dollars influencing supposedly objective university research, labs raided, research results stolen and so on.  Designer genes were being treated like designer jeans and it was all discomfortingly reminiscent of Devo's "Mr. DNA" (1979). Seeing the plot re-emerge in their CD-ROM over a decade later when gene splicing and nanotechnology have entered our everyday vocabulary, Devo would be forgiven for seeing themselves as the  H.G. Wells of this fin de siècle.

While Casale's futuristic fatalism stemmed from a schoolboy fascination with the science fiction novels of Huxley and Asimov, his disgust with humanity took on a concrete form in the summer of 1970. "I probably turned to science fiction and genetic engineering as an escape because until that point I had been in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). I was one of the students at Kent State University when we had the rally against the extension of the war into Cambodia, and they chased us over the hill and shot at us with M-16's and they blew holes in 9 people and killed four of them - Two of whom were my very close friends.  That was a period when my disgust with human behavior and the cynicism of our politics was solidified and it pretty well formed Devo. Until then I was more typical of a hippie, which was already a commodity by the 70's. Hippie was by then what 'alternative music' is now.  Mainstream, but with the packaging that it is rebellious.  And its not."

"At the time of the killings at Kent State I was already doing art with Mark Mothersbaugh, who was "using" the art facilities there at the time. I was doing art I had dubbed "Art Devo". It was a joke, first there was Art Nouveau, then there was Art Deco, well this was Art Devo. It was the art of de-evolution. We would get high school year books from junk stores in Ohio and take pictures of horrific looking kids from the 50's with buzz cuts. Taking stylised bites out of their heads we would introduce the "pissed off" Spud. Then call the series "Attack of the Spudman". People thought we were fucked up and stupid. It wasn't "art", it wasn't even graphically hip. Two years later in 1972 we started thinking about what the music of Art Devo would sound like." After posing as Devo's "manager" Casale secured them a gig at NewYork's CBGB's which was in the midst of punk mania. Before they knew it Devo has gained a devoted following from the very same masses whose knee-jerk consumer clone behavior they had set out to parody.

 Like the art students they originally were Casale and Mothersbaugh took the money allocated under their record deal for t-shirts and used it instead to make  music videos. Employing all the tools of ‘Art Devo’ their videos revolutionised the staid concept of recording artists perform and changed the face of MTV when it went on air in 1981. Not content to work just within this medium, they “believed the hype” and gambled on laser disc to be the next medium to blow vinyl and video out of the pop culture game. While they were wrong about that future prediction, the skills learnt shooting videos and producing laser discs stood them well when Devo, the band, fell apart in the late ‘80s. Mothersbaugh went on to a successful career writing scores for movies and TV and Casale continued with his passion for music video.  While he admits that his latest clip, the Foo Fighters video "I'll Stick Around", tested his patience with the machinations of the recording industry and its tendency to be populated by ‘total assholes’ he adds that Dave Grohl (ex-Nirvana) “was a very cool guy” and supported his somewhat twisted artistic vision.  Nonetheless, it's plain his need to parody the music industry is founded in bitter experiences from the past.

This time around Mothersbaugh and Casale have a whole new cache of subjects to parody but one of their longtime favourites (besides the music industry) remains - the Moral Majority.  Now with alliances between the religious right and neo-conservatives, who hold power in the Congress, a group like the Pilgrims no longer seems that far-fetched.  "The Pilgrims, while inspired by the Newt, are actually based on Ralph Read” says Casale. “A total psycho telly-vangelist who is dangerous precisely because he sounds so rational and well-read.  He's part of the new religious right who realised that they has to change their frame of reference and their rhetoric, in much the same way tobacco companies has to change their campaigns to get 13 yr-olds to smoke because all their older consumers were dying from lung cancer.  So Ralph Read is this boy-scout-looking pervo who comes on all intellectual but has this paranoid right-wing super moralistic rap.  He's particularly insidious because he manipulates the media so well.  He uses the Web, telemarketing, national networks to pull in tonnes of money.  So now he has huge influence over politicians and is actually getting legislation enacted.  In a culture that has been 'dumbed down', is not well-read and responds only to sound bites and 30 second commercials these guys really thrive."

In a society where access to information is becoming the new dividing line between the haves and have nots, Casale and Mothersbaugh are attempting to keep the average consumer abreast of important technological changes. Having recently read a theory that the 'Information Superhighway' and the whole concept of cyberspace is the latest manifestation of "white flight" (the last frontier for the haves to escape from the have nots).  I run this idea past Casale. "Yeah that theory certainly has an element of truth to it. It makes me sick, all these old hippies waxing poetic about the revolutionary power of computers. Computers are clearly not a tool of empowerment for the little people. They are not leveling the playing field they are simply changing it - they're just creating a new elite. But the real money in the world is creating plans to terraform Mars. Very concrete plans, there is a timetable, a methodology". 

When I mutter incredulously that this sounds like the plot of Total Recall, Casale replies zealously, "That's because whoever wrote it would have got the information by reading science magazines. It's simple. First they excavate the core and blow out huge amounts of materials to create an umbrella around the planet.  If you read scientific papers you'll see it would take 200 years to replicate the same balance of elements as Earth -oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and so on. We wouldn't need breather packs. In the time prior to that you'd live in domes or biospheres which would be outer-space versions of upper-middle class gated communities that we have now all over America. These hideous developments - condos on Mars - would probably be faux-Mediterranean and bank approved. It will be like Disneyworld but without a sense of irony. They're looking at the span of real life on Earth - a maximum of another 200 years before everything is impossibly polluted. It'll be like Bel-Air on Mars - that's the ultimate "white flight".

Depending on the success of Devo Presents: The Adventures of the Smart Patrol, Mothersbaugh and Casale will release episode two which will take place on, you guessed it, Mars. At the end of Episode One, the Smart Patrol think they have escaped the wrath of the Pilgrims, but they get kidnapped and sent as part of the forced labour squad - which is the Mars Terraformation Team.  Says Casale with a glint in his eye, "I can't wait to do it for the physical look - the graphics alone will be will be out of this world.  It will be like Spartacus in Outer Space." One can only hope that unlike gene splicing and media monopolies,zs faux-Mediterranean condos on Mars never become a reality.