Music Arcades: Devo: Hot Potatoes

I had to get a Devo album because they're associated with two of the people I count as heroes, Neil Young and Brian Eno. Neil credits Devo as the source of the expression "Rust Never Sleeps", and they appear in his film Human Highway (remind me to tell you more about that film another time — I'm afraid right now the whole family is battling illness and every little tangent comes at the cost of much-needed sleep). Meanwhile, Eno produced Devo's first album.

The thing about Devo is that it's always seemed like the para-musical elements — from the hats, through the Kraftwerk-style suppression of individuality, to the permanently-arched eyebrow of their performance attitude — outweighed any of the musical bits. So once you've heard six or seven tracks, it all gets a bit samey on the ear. I liked that late-70s moment when people who might otherwise have been performance artists decided to ply their trade through pop music, but Talking Heads and Pere Ubu did it better, for longer, and with consistently original ideas.

The most interesting way to view Devo is through another association that they shared with both Neil Young and Brian Eno, that with filmmaker Bruce Conner (who died earlier this year). Here's Conner's video for Devo's Mongoloid.

Conner also did a couple of videos for Byrne and Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, including one of my favourites of his, America is Waiting (watch for the little sting in the tail in the final frames).

The Neil Young connection? Well, Conner and he were friends, or at least acquaintances — as reported 20 years or so ago in the pages of Broken Arrow — and I reckon Neil's filmmaking drew on Conner's low-fi found-object approach.