Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The quintessential Devo, August 26, 2002
Twenty years after I first heard it, this album still makes its way into regular rotation on my stereo. This is a collection of brilliant songs recorded at the peak of Devo's career; compositionally superb, lyrically eloquent, catchy and singable. And it rocks - albeit in a robotic, highly quantized way. Even setting aside the radio hit ("Whip It," as if you didn't know), the album has so many of my favorite Devo songs: Girl U Want, Freedom of Choice, Gates of Steel, Ton O Luv, the weirdly touching Snowball... there's not a bad song on there. What makes this album so perfect is that it keeps the weirdness and edginess of their previous albums, but adds in a few shades of pop. Regrettably, this mixture only succeeded for one more album (New Traditionalists) before they started leaning too far to the pop side of the fence. I think by the time the album "Shout" was released they had thrown away their guitars completely, which made me sad. Also, some of my favorite songs were written by Jerry Casale, whose compositions are notably absent from later Devo albums. I've always wondered about that. The original LP also had the most hilarious (or was it serious?) record sleeve - a catalog of the oddest Devo products imaginable. To this day I regret not ordering the leisure suit. I hear people compare this band with other supposed "new wave" bands, whatever that means. Two comparisons work for me - Oingo Boingo and Talking Heads. If you like them, you will most definitely like this.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Q: Are These Not Flower Pots? A: They Are Energy Domes!, January 11, 2005
Something you'll know if you're in the know about Devo. The spudboys from Akron, O-hi-o were music's inside joke for their useable shelf life: A musical act, predicated on the premise of de-evolution, which surely and steadily devolves into a corporate computer and synth outfit.
I can't tell you how many times I heard that "Devo sold out!" Well, the joke's on you, because that is what Devo was all about: Selling out! Why do you think they went to great lengths to create the cheesy Rod Rooter and insert him in their videos as a stand-in for the hack producers who were forced upon them?
Devo was all about packaging and marketing. Is it any wonder that twenty years later, Target uses "Beautiful World" to sell consumer America on their idea of a beautiful world, a cold and grinch-like place in which Salvation Army bellringers are sent back to their slums, out of sight of Target's newly upscale clientele?
But, I digress.
Devo started dropping little "Paul Is Dead" style hints about their parodies of corporate music in their second album, "Duty Now for the Future," which indeed begins with the highly official and authoritarian "Devo Corporate Anthem." Spreading their (Mr.) DNA by means of the Smart Patrol, Devo infected America's ears with the seminal fluid of a one-size-fits-all prefabricated world. Flying beneath the radar, it was a Triumph of the Will on their part.
Which brings us at long last to this album, whose signature marketing gimmick was the vacu-plastic Energy Dome (or, red flower pots, to the uninitiated); an Energy Dome hat pin was available to students on a budget, or fair-weather spuds. Again, my punker friends told me "Devo is selling out!" They entirely missed the send-up of tie-in marketing the pop music had foisted on them for generations. Devo's yellow suits (official nomenclature: Anti-Human-Element suits), Duty Now atomic symbol student-T's, plastic pompadours, maxi speak-no-evil-turtlenecks, spudring collars and Chinese-American friendship pins were all Devo's antisceptic answers to the Monkees' lunchbox, Partridge Family shopping bags, the Jackson-5ive cartoons and Beatles coloring books.
"Freedom of Choice" is Devo's hallmark of artistic fame and corporate shame. "Use Your Freedom of Choice," they wail -- whilst narrowing your freedom of choice to five identically uniformed petrochemical rocker nerds. "Whip It!" About the joys of self devo-tion, sadomasochism or (to quote Mark Mothersbaugh, in a later interview) simply "a self-help song?" YOU make the choice!
This album's chock full of eminently danceable songs in 4/4 time: Aside from the aforementioned, "Girl U Want," "Ton O' Luv," "Gates of Steel" and "That's Pep" are the least devolved.
"Planet Earth" is code for Devo's observation that we really don't have freedom of choice, but can be satisfied with the illusion of same. It looks forward to "Beautiful World" on their next vinyl offering.
Devo-ted spuds will make note that the contemporaneous tune "Turnaround" is not on this or any other album version; It was only available as the flip side to the "Whip It" 45 rpm.
But, thanks to corporate music mavens such as Rod Rooter of Big Entertainment, you can't get 45's anymore. Just compact discs. And, government-controlled MP-3s.
Now *that's* what I call Freedom of Choice!
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a man is real, not made of steel!, June 12, 2000
This album very much signalled the start of the 80s. This contains their 3 biggest hits, Girl U Want [covered by a million bands], the immortal Whip It & Freedom Of Choice itself, about the dilemma of modern society obsessed w/ consumerism & all the choices available that the drones want the decisions made for them, not forgetting that it rocks like hell. Other highlights include Gates of Steel, Planet Earth, Cold War ["so we are told that all is fair in love & war, so what's life for, the endless tug of war"]. Kurt Cobain had said that Devo were the most subversive of all the punk era bands that became pop stars. The thing that's great about Freedom of Choice is that it's not even their best album, their debut Are We Not Men? is so fundamentally excellent but FOC is extremely important to global consciousness nevertheless [ooh big words]. I think they liked toying w/ the minds of MTV viewers & K-mart shoppers by appearing to be so plastic & disposable whilst really being quite intellectual [I think maybe they took Zappa's Plastic people to its illogical conclusion "you think we're singing about someone else?"]. Buy it or don't, use yr freedom of choice... [that has to be 1 of the best album titles of all time along w/ Confusion Is Sex & Safe As Milk]...
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