Something for Everybody

Turn on your television this week, and you'll be met with a houseful of lolling, dead-eyed numpties, or aggressive simians in aprons bellowing obscenities at hapless kitchen staff. Board a train, and you'll be faced with legions of apparently sane people reading the Daily Mail. Complete financial collapse is imminent; and a pudgy, whey-faced child is in charge of the nation's finances.

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Devo are back and this time they’ve got slightly different hats. Fortunately where the energy domes have changed, Devo’s tongue-in-cheek world view hasn’t. At the heart of the band there has always been a fantastic dichotomy between intelligence and an über-knowing stupidity. A band inspired by the Kent State Shootings preaching about social decline yet doing so with pop-hooks dressed in kitsch sci-fi outfits. A band of academic punk rockers mocking themselves as much of the world around them.

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There are a few bad omens hovering around Something For Everybody. It's been two decades since Devo last attempted a full album of new music-- and 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps wasn't memorable. Then there's the fact that the band seems more interested in their marketing campaign than the music-- a scary enough preference to begin with, but even worse considering said campaign is basically simple crowd-sourcing presented as some kind of conceptual art.

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“Don’t Shoot (I’m a Man)”, from Devo’s long-delayed Something for Everybody, closes with a refrain of, “Don’t tase me, bro!” This is really all you need to know about the venerable New Waver’s new album. “Don’t tase me, bro”, of course, refers to the incident at the University of Florida in 2007, when an uncooperative heckler was detained by security at a John Kerry speech and zapped. YouTube turned the event into a digital wildfire, and by 2008, “tase/taze” had become the New Oxford English Dictionary’s most searched word. Now, a little over two years later, a century in Internet years, “Don’t tase me, bro” might as well be “Got Milk?”, so hearing it on Something for Everybody sounds like nerdy Dad trying to be cool Dad.

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