Use Your Freedom of Choice
The world is ending, yes, but it’s always been. This is no surprise. It is surprising, however, to watch a band that has existed for half a century continue to give a shit about anything, up to and including performing their solitary hit for the millionth time.
Side Note: I saw Television play a few years ago and found their performance so stiff, so emotionless, the experience felt tantamount to standing in an overcrowded room listening to someone play a Spotify shuffle of the band’s most streamed songs through a PA system. I wasn’t exactly expecting pyro, but still. Leaning against the back bar, drinking translucent plastic cup after translucent plastic cup of serve-yourself tap water, I couldn’t help but think I would have rather stayed home, listened to “Marquee Moon,” and:
Not have been surrounded by middle aged white guys named Craig
Not have paid $36 plus service fees for the privilege
Death, much like Ticketmaster service fees, is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t cheat it. Mark Mothersbaugh contracted COVID and was in the ICU on a ventilator for two weeks last year, fading in and out of a delusional state, yet lived to tell the tale (and be terrorized by TikTokers while recuperating at home, the ability for someone to become rich enough through TikTok to rent a party house in the Hollywood Hills during a global pandemic being an example of de-evolution in action). Had he perished, two members of DEVO would be dead. As it stands now, only one is.
All things considered, DEVO could have phoned it in last night at their show in the sterile, clinical (non-energy) dome of the “YouTube Theater,” a charmless concert facility so new you could visualize protective plastic being peeled off its gray seats minutes before the crowd’s arrival, but they didn’t; I know they didn’t because they cared enough to be human, cared enough to occasionally play poorly. Their cognitive abilities got progressively worse throughout the night but their enthusiasm never ceased — the show’s prompt, 8:17PM start time was the only thing that belied the band’s age.
I hadn’t seen them live since they played a (now shuttered) horse racing track by the airport over a decade ago, where tickets were $8 and hot dogs $2. (While draft beers were “ONLY $3 UNTIL 9,” the hot dogs remained “$2 ALL NIGHT!” Tubes of ground pig anuses flowed like wine.)
Any other “legendary” band could, and probably would, feel debased to experience such an indignity, but DEVO is possibly the only “legendary” band in existence born to play a county fair; to thrive in a low- to no-culture environment. Knowing, as they do, that everything, up to and including human existence, is meaningless renders pride a non-entity. This is a lesson that has served both the band and myself well.
I have never, nor will I ever, write for television — the medium’s lack of interest in me is mutual. A friend of mine, however, was too exhausted from slogging away at the content mines all week to attend last night’s show, so he bequeathed his sixth row ticket to me, a poor spud who was planning on attending anyhow but had purchased the cheapest nosebleed ticket possible. While having the respect of my successful peers is virtually never monetizable, it is not without its benefits.
Even though I was excited for the gig, I did not expect to be as moved, as inspired, as I became while watching a collection of 70 year old men perform 50 year old songs of angst. Yes, I had consumed a weed gummy while sitting on the toilet earlier, but that had nothing to do with it — and anyway, as we all know, pairing nominal amounts of weed with bowel-clenching amounts of caffeine is the recovering alcoholic’s cheat code.
Anyone who has grown up in a brown town full of mouth breathers has felt, at some point during their adolescence, like a mutant, an alien entity not of the same race that bred the proud-to-be-proud, steak-consuming shit kickers who surrounded them. Finding DEVO as a teenager was like stumbling upon a collection of audible, watchable sacred scrolls; an escape valve from the misery that was normalcy. Not only were they mutants, they were proud of it. Their staunchly DIY ethos made them immutable and incorruptible; their anti-establishmentarian worldview made them, to me, irresistible.
Their message was clear: the world was ending but that didn’t mean you didn’t have agency. If you wanted shit to get made, and to the specifications you envisioned, you couldn’t rely on permission. You had to choose to do it yourself. If you’re a mutant, most people won’t “get” whatever you do, but that’s fine — most people like Pepsi. You may have no pride, but at least, if you never compromise, you still have your dignity.
Because when you do something you actually love, something you actually believe in, and you do it for the right reasons (getting laid or famous, naturally, don’t qualify as right reasons), you can do it in a basement or a horse racing track or a corporately-branded concert hall. If you’re doing it for the right reasons, you’ll expend the same amount of energy regardless of the year, or the audience, or the venue. When you do it for the right reasons, you’ll play the hit but still, y’know, have fun with it (“Here’s a song we’ve been working on,” Jerry Casale said, by way of introducing “Whip It”).
Mothersbaugh, in spite of the fact that he recently almost fucking died, jubilantly circled the stage, mugging and playing to the entire audience, including the bands’ friends standing on the side. He whipped energy domes like frisbees into the crowd; he ripped away at the bands’ paper hazmat suits, leaving them in tatters. His motions were so fevered, so frenetic, one of his knee pads came loose and slid down his ankle; you could read his name written in permanent marker on the back of it.
And in the Year of Our Lord 2021, the band didn’t just play “Mongoloid,” they made a fucking meal out of it, with Mothersbaugh picking up pom poms and acting out the titular character having a job, wearing a hat, et al. Did they immediately follow it up with “Jocko Homo”? Is de-evolution real? (Yes, and yes.)
And at the end, Booji Boy emerged in a Los Angeles Chargers jersey with his name on the back and expounded on the inescapable extinction of the human race. “Planet Earth is gonna solve the problem all on its own,” he said. “The end of the world. It’s gonna be good for it.” The mutants are about to go down with the ship someone else capsized, but it doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy ourselves while we’re still here.