Are They Not Memes?: Devo on How De-evolution Is More Meaningful Than Ever, as Band Celebrates 50 Years With a New Compilation and Tour
25.10.2023 - 00:37
/ variety.com
Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Devo was, and is, the ultimate future-proof band. When they first entered the public consciousness in the late ‘70s, Mark Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale and company seemed impossibly ahead of their time — in a primitive-futurist kind of way — and they still do. There’s very little that you could consider dated about the 50 cuts on their new career retrospective, “50 Years of De-Evolution 1973-2023,” since their worldview always kind of seemed to be trained on offering up dystopianism with a smile and a jacked-up synth-rock beat.
De-evolution, for better or worse, is timeless, and so, apparently, are the men who introduced it to the world. Beyond the just-released Rhino collection, the band is engaged in a round of touring that will take them up and down the west coast through the first three weeks of November, including a show at L.A.’s YouTube Theatre on Nov. 16 and a festival date in Orange County two days later.
(Scroll down for the full list of dates.) They admit they may not be timeless in every regard. Mothersbaugh tells Variety how it felt being on tour in Europe recently: “I really enjoyed doing the European shows. It reminded me enough of the old days that it was fun.
And I mean, we don’t look the same. But when I was a kid I loved to go see Hound Dog Taylor and different old blues players. And you’d look at their album covers and then you’d see them in person and you’d go, ‘Whoa, that’s pretty hardcore.’ Like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, that was 15 years ago or 20 years ago, when the album came out.’ And so now you see kids in the audience give you looks like that.
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