Devo

The über-dorks who made America uncomfortable for a couple years in the 1980s, Devo have emerged as one of the most influential bands of the decade, thanks to this 1978 debut. Not only did they make New Wave safe for the masses, they gleefully turned rock 'n' roll icons on their heads without forgetting to make music that rocks. See "Uncontrollable Urge" for proof.

What's Most Impressive about Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is its authority: Devo
presents their dissociated, chillingly cerebral music as a definitive restatement of rock &
roll's aims and boundaries in the Seventies. The band's cover version of "Satisfaction," for
instance, with its melody line almost completely erased and the lyrics delivered in a
yelping, droogy chant to mechanical rhythms, at first comes across as an intenti... More >

If this isn't Kiss for college kids, then it's Meat Loaf for college kids who are too sophisticated to like Meat Loaf. Aside from music per se, the Kiss connection is in their cartoonishness--Devo's robot moves create distance, a margin of safety, the way Kiss's makeup does. But the Meat Loaf connection is deeper, because this is real midnight-movie stuff--the antihumanist sci-fi silliness, the reveling in decay, the thrill of being in a cult that could attract millions and still seem like a cult, since 200 million others will never even get curious. (It's no surprise to be told that a lot of their ideas come from Eraserhead, but who wants to go see Eraserhead to make sure?) What makes this group worthy of attention at all--and now we're back with Kiss, though at a more complex level--is the catchy, comical, herky-jerky rock and roll they've devised out of the same old basic materials. In small doses it's as good as novelty music ever gets, and there isn't a really bad cut on this album. But it leads nowhere. (Grade - B+)