Reader’s Choice/Tom’s Top Tunes…Song #39/250: Whip It by Devo

As the Summer of Love drew to an end and the decade of the 1970s dawned, the United States found itself embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. Many young people, empowered as they were by all that they experienced in the 1960s, felt that the time was right to challenge the authority of those making these warmongering policies. There were numerous protest songs written and performed by singers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and others. Not surprisingly, many of these young people opted to turn their feelings into action. There were school sit-ins; many letters were written to local newspapers, as well as to national magazines and most noticeably, there were protest marches and rallies. Many of these rallies occurred on college and university campuses. At these rallies, there would be fiery speeches delivered, folk songs sung and vows taken to effect change by whatever means necessary. Needless to say, the members of the political establishment didn’t take kindly to being criticized in such a public manner, and they responded in kind by trying to shut these protests down. On May 4, 1970, one such student-led protest rally took place on the grounds of Kent State University in Ohio. At this rally, students were carrying signs, shouting slogans and marching to attract enough public attention to force pressure on the federal government led by President Richard Nixon. As was becoming common, national guardsmen were called up to active duty in an effort to quell the protest and to ensure it didn’t turn violent. As the protest march moved along, emotions became heightened by proponents of both sides of the issue. Eventually, tensions boiled over and national guardsmen opened fire. Four Kent State student protesters were killed, and more than a dozen others were injured. In a time of war it isn’t easy for a local event to have shock value on a national level, but the shootings at Kent State University did just that. There are many who point to this moment as being the moment that the tide began turning away from supporting US involvement in the Vietnam War. Some even say that it turned trust away from the Nixon government and paved the way for the Watergate hearings to take place. Regardless of such historical speculation, this moment in history was one of the first times in which government-sanctioned killing of its own civilians happened in the golden age of television broadcasting. The Kent State killings galvanized the mood of a nation and changed the course of history. One of the lesser known consequences of this moment in time was that it spawned the creation of a band that became known as Devo.

In the late 1960s, there were two friends named Gerald Casale and Mark Lewis. They attended Kent State University as art students. While there, they met a keyboardist named Mark Mothersbaugh and decided to channel some of their political energy into forming a band with a performance art foundation to it. They decided to call themselves Devo because of the term de-evolution. Up until the end of the 1960s, the prevalent view in society was that humans were continuing to evolve and grow and develop as a species in many important ways. However, with things like the Vietnam War going on, it seemed as though humanity was going backwards or “devolving”, as they put it. This state of mind was further entrenched with the shootings at their university campus. Mothersbaugh and Casale each knew two of the students who were killed. What happened that day wasn’t just another instance of the might of the system being used against ordinary people; this was actually something that affected them directly on a personal level. Thus, the band Devo was formed as a reaction to what had happened and was continuing to happen elsewhere to other people. The boys in the band decided that their weapon of choice in fighting against what they perceived as oppression from the government would be their creativity, their humour and their music. Consequently, Devo formed with the intention of challenging America through humour and weirdness.

As the 1970s reached their mid-way point, the band had begun to attract the attention of other theatrically minded artists such as David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. It was because of their interest in the band that Devo landed its first record contract. Their debut album was entitled Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! Although the album had no charting singles, it was well received by music critics who hailed its fresh, unorthodox approach to music. However, when their second album came and went without spawning any hit singles, Devo’s record label gave them an ultimatum to produce a hit song, or else they were going to be dropped. Devo’s third album was called Freedom of Choice. One of the tracks on this album was a song called “Whip It”. This song was never intended to be released as a single. In fact, the only reason that “Whip It” ever saw the light of day was because a radio DJ named Kal Rudman discovered it while listening to the album on his own time at home. He felt that the song was quirky and had that special something that hit songs seem to possess, so he started playing it on his radio show in the southern US. Listener reaction was positive. Sales of the album began to rise as a result. Before anyone knew it, “Whip It” had cracked the Top 40. The demand for concert tickets forced the band to relocate their shows to bigger venues. Soon they found themselves appearing on shows like Saturday Night Live. It all seemed unreal for the band. One of the reasons for this is because “Whip It” is a song that doesn’t have lyrics in the form of a traditional narrative. Instead, it is made up of motivational slogans from the government. The whole vibe of the song is as a motivational piece of music that derives its emotion from vague, meaningless sloganeering…”Get Straight! Move forward” all strung together in a row, all with the aim of convincing people to “whip” their troubles in life through endless optimism. To push this storyline even further, the band members decided to wear red pyramid style plastic hats because, at the time, there was widespread belief that pyramids, as a geometric shape, helped channel positive energy. The band did not actually believe this. It was part of the theatricality of their act. It was performance art on a national stage. Which brings us to the video for “Whip It”.

When the song first became popular, there were many people who thought that the song was about masturbation, or else that it was about kinky sex. The fact that the song is festooned with whip cracking noises added to the belief that this song was sexual in nature. As mentioned above, “Whip It” never had even the remotest thing to do with sex. But, since Americans seemed hell bent on maintaining that line of thought and because the media didn’t seem to be doing anything to dissuade anyone from this point of view, Devo decided to up the ante with their video. The video for “Whip It” is based upon a news article that Mothersbaugh had read about a cattle rancher who had married a stripper. Together, the rancher and the stripper combined their skills to create a burlesque-caliber act in which the rancher used a whip to remove his wife’s clothing, one piece at a time, while on stage. Therefore, in the video for the song, Mothersbaugh dons his pyramid hat, the rest of the band wears jumpsuits and appears in a cattle pen, all the while Mothersbaugh pretends to whip the clothes away from the body of a woman who is smoking a cigarette. If you watch the video carefully, it was constructed in a campy fashion on purpose. The whip never touches the model with the cigarette. Instead, her clothing is whipped away with a fishing line that is clearly visible on screen. Despite the ridiculousness of the entire setup, there were some accusations hurled against the band that they were engaging in misogynistic behaviour. The band members laughed off such charges because, as they stated many times, the entire song is a colossal joke meant to mock modern music and the intelligence of those who make up society’s establishment. But a funny thing happened to this merry band of pranksters. “Whip It”, joke song or not, became not only a big hit that sold millions of copies worldwide, it became one of the songs that acted as the soundtrack for an entire new genre of music in America called New Wave! “Whip It” helped to introduce synth-driven rock into the national spotlight. I will end this post with a tiny piece of trivia that you can throw around at parties if you like:  The main synthesizer riff that has come to be most closely associated with this song was actually lifted directly from the bassline of Roy Orbison’s song “Pretty Woman”. It is true. GIve the song a listen and you can hear Roy Orbison’s guitar work coming out of Mark Mothersbaugh’s keyboards.

“Whip It” was the only song that Devo recorded that ever became a chart success. For that reason, Devo is often lumped into that category known as being a one-hit wonder. The technical statistical facts of the matter support their placement in this category. However, to promote this view is to truly not understand Devo’s mission statement as performers. They formed together as a band to use humour as a way to start conversations about how American society was structured and how its norms are maintained by those making the decisions. Being able to satirize the power dynamic at play in their world was what Devo was all about. Any success that the band achieved was simply icing on their artistic cake. However, it has to be stated that the impact of Devo extends far beyond that one hit song of theirs. Bands that made it big a generation later such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam all pointed back to the subversive nature of what Devo did as helping to inspire them musically and politically, too. The members of Devo had always worked beyond the confines of the band. For example, Mark Mothersbaugh has dozens of film credits for scoring feature length films such as Thor: Ragnarok,  the Hotel Transylvania movies as well as that most recent movie that makes a mockery of real movies Cocaine Bear. The other band members have all also worked in film or music or theatre, too.

At the end of the day, the idea behind concepts such as Devo is that societal change can be made without having to resort to violence or war. If Devo ran the world, societal change would involve red plastic pyramid hats, plenty of synthesizers and lots of subtle humour that comes straight from the heart. The Arts matter. So do people. End of discussion.

The link to the video for the song “Whip It” by Devo can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to the official website for Devo can be found here.

The link to the official website for Kent State University can be found here.

***As always, all original content contained within this post remains the sole property of the author. No portion of this post shall be reblogged, copied or shared in any manner without the express written consent of the author. ©2023 http://www.tommacinneswriter.com