ARE WE NOT MEN?
WE ARE DEVO!
Devo second album
On this date in 1980, DEVO released their third studio album FREEDOM OF CHOICE, (16th May, 1980).
NOTE: The video here is DEVO performing to a playback of GIRL YOU WANT on French TV in 1980.
Sex in DEVO’s third studio album FREEDOM OF CHOICE was disguised and euphemised, but only very thinly. In many ways, this was the perfect Devo album — for, if dealing with humanity as a collection of biological blobs, this was a mechanical soundtrack for a mechanical pursuit.
Musically, the album was more of a whole than previously, and stripped of the quirky spikiness which characterised Q: Are We Not Men? Packed with eminently danceable rhythms and eminently memorable melodies, FOC found Devo eschewing lead-guitar breaks for bursts of punctuative rhythm guitar.
On the surface, ‘Freedom of choice’ looked to be a song celebrating personal freedom. But no. This was Devo fearful of man’s regression to a preliterate society, back to the herd.
"We loved that song very much when we were creating it,” said Jerry Casale in 2003.
“It was about how people were throwing away their freedom of choice into meaningless choices like between Pepsi and Coke, or pink fur shoes or blue suede shoes. Just mindless consumerism. They'd rather not be free, they'd rather be told what to do, because that's what appeared to us was the case, especially in the Reagan years. That was a very Devo position: Freedom of choice is what you've got, freedom from choice is what you want.”
The video here is single GIRL U WANT, toying with the advertising campaigns that depict must-have buys, framed by the words ‘WANT IT’ with the question mark deliberately left out.
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