By Iain Blair

Was chatting with Gerry Casale, founder of the great ‘80s art band Devo – who can forget “Whip It” and the raunchy/funny video the band did? – which Gerry directed for them as usual. “It only cost $15,000 and we’d never get away with what we did in it today,” he told me. “The censors would have a field day – and the budget would be $150,000 now.”  The big irony? “All our songs were in code  -  so “Going Under” was really all about sex, and “Snowball” was about coke addiction and so on – except for “Whip It,” which was totally literal,” he told me. “Everyone immediately assumed it was about S&M and masturbation, because we were this subversive band, so it seemed logical.” Although Devo disbanded in the early ‘90s, they’ve reformed for several mini-tours, “and we’ve been busy in the studio doing tracks for the Rockband video game which uses 3D CG humanoids imitating the band you’re hearing,” he reports. “And we just wrote a new song for a big Dell commercial, “Watch Us Work It,” which got a lot of airtime and got us tons of calls from various producers about doing more tracks, so we’ll see.”

Share This

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.