Devo formed as an artistic response to the Kent State shootings, channeling outrage into satirical, absurdist performance instead of straightforward protest. The band's clipped guitars, squiggly synthesizers, and playful lyrics mask a conceptual project rooted in the idea of de-evolution. Early members knew victims of the shootings and preferred an attack as senseless as the violence itself, expressed through art. Years of radio play and contextless streaming dulled the original conceptual framing. A recent Netflix release restores those underpinnings, showing Devo as an idea before a musical focus and tracing the band's playful, quick-witted catalog.
If all you know of Devo is hit singles like "Whip It," they don't sound like a band that was formed in response to the Kent State shootings of May 4, 1970, when National Guard troops opened fire on an anti-war protest and killed four unarmed college students. With their clipped guitars and squiggly synthesizers, their songs don't sound like protest music, and their lyrics are a jumble of absurdist poetry and references to midnight movies and discarded junk culture.
But while Young was writing from a safe distance, Casale, then an art major, witnessed the Kent State killings up close, and knew two of the victims personally. And to him and his fellow students, Mothersbaugh and Bob Lewis, the appropriate response wasn't a melancholy lament but an attack as violently senseless as the shootings themselves, channeled through art instead of a rifle barrel.
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