There was probably a time in my life when I was self-conscious about liking something that was "weird." My go-to mini-anecdote for this phenomenon is when a cute girl asked me to lend her my Discman's headphones so she could check out what I was listening to, and by coincidence I was smack dab in the middle of Olivia Tremor Control's "Green Typewriters" ten-song suite. Joanna probably heard minute six of an eleven-minute ambient track that sounds like a homeless man silently sleeping in Athens' sewer system. "Weird" is the opposite of "cool," and as a teenager, I was well aware that "weird" doesn't get you laid (or, rather, "laid," since I didn't have sex for the first time until I was about nineteen and a half).
So this blind spot can be explained by the fact that I assumed Devo was too weird to listen to.
Can you blame me? Rolling Stone's list warned me that this was a good album, but I saw a nerdy dude in a fedora on the cover, a garrulous title, and an indication that this was "new wave" (for which I only had an elemental understanding of, at the time), and I thought: nope, too weird.
What I failed to understand at the time, and what I'm still learning now, is that "weird" is very often "cool" as well. I saw a comic one time that was like "it's pretty convenient that you don't fit in right now, because that means you're going to develop cool interests, and when all your peers are old enough to appreciate that, you're going to be really popular." It's true! When you're a stupid fucking teen, "cool" and "weird" are two separate things. But eventually they converge, and so if you're weird early on, you're at an advantage.
Devo is at the point of convergence. It's weird, and at this point, it's undoubtedly cool.
The things that are cool: tight hooks; herky-jerky rhythms; deconstructing otherwise immortal Rolling Stones songs; crazy time signatures; vocals so uncool that they become cool again; sounding like "the 1980s" before those tropes even existed; getting produced by one cool aYoBS artist after another aYoBS artist dropped out; not getting popular (with "Whip It" on this specific case) for two more years and two more albums; completely confounding teen Joe's expectations; existing as a hypothetical retroactive corrective to the bus snafu, whereas Joanne would have definitely made out with me if she had grabbed my headphones and heard "Uncontrollable Urge," right? Right?!
This is some good shit and don't let any mean moronic teenagers tell you any differently.
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