Devo are one of the 2021 nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Jay-Z, Foo Fighters, Tina Turner, Iron Maiden, Mary J. Blige, LL Cool J, Todd Rundgren, The Go-Go's, Rage Against The Machine, and New York Dolls, among others. And I love Devo and have long meant to include them in this series, so here's hoping they get in this year. I think just from an artistic standpoint, they're one of the most deserving, one of the most original bands to ever go platinum. 

Devo deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Space Girl Blues

2. Baby Talkin' Bitches

3. Uncontrollable Urge

4. Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')

5. Shrivel-Up

6. Praying Hands

7. Gut Feeling / (Slap Your Mammy)

8. Devo Corporate Anthem

9. Clockout

10. Wiggly World

11. Blockhead

12. Smart Patrol / Mr. DNA

13. It's Not Right

14. Snowball

15. That's Pep! 

16. Planet Earth

17. Don't You Know

18. Turn Around

19. Going Under

20. Love Without Anger

21. Enough Said

22. Pity You

23. Big Mess

24. Speed Racer

25. Out Of Sync

26. Don't Rescue Me

27. Puppet Boy

When I made my Replacements playlist last year, I wrote about how I'd swap mixtapes with people in high school and college, and how my gateway for several bands, including Devo, was through somebody's homemade best-of tapes, which I'd listen to in my car for years and kind of supplanted my need to check out those artists' proper albums until much later. So about 2/3rds of the songs on this playlist are songs that were on a Devo mixtape somebody made me 20-something years ago, partly because someone else's favorite Devo songs informed what became my favorite Devo songs.  

The two albums Devo released on Enigma after being dropped from Warner Bros., 1988's Total Devo and 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps, are not currently on streaming services. And while it would've been nice to include some good later songs like "Happy Guy," I was okay with only really covering the group's work up to 1984, because they were kind of on a commercial and creative decline for the entirety of the '80s. 

I made the Deep Album Cuts series as an attempt to kind of provide a counterpoint to various acts' 'greatest hits' albums, but of course, some bands have actually made official collections with that concept. In 1990, a couple years before Public Enemy packaged an album of rarities as Greatest Misses, Warner Bros. released a Devo Greatest Hits collection alongside a Greatest Misses album. Inevitably, my playlist has 5 of the same songs as Greatest Misses (as well as a 3 non-singles that were on Greatest Hits). 

Around the same time in the early '90s, Rykodisc issued two Hardcore Devo compilations of the group's mid-'70s 4-track demos, including early versions of Q: Are We Not Men?  and Duty Now For The Future songs and tons of stuff that never wound up on a proper album. In 2014, shortly after Bob Casale's death, Devo celebrated the band's 40th anniversary with a tour of Hardcore-era material, which spawned the Hardcore Devo Live! concert album. So I thought it'd be cool to kick off the playlist with some of that stuff before their official debut. 

Of course, when Devo finally did debut in 1978, they arrived as this remarkable, fully formed phenomenon. The first track on their first album, "Uncontrollable Urge," was never released as a single, but it's always been heralded as one of the greatest Devo songs, if not the greatest. And over the years it's slowly seeped into pop culture, appearing in several movies including Wolf Of Wall Street. A cover of "Uncontrollable Urge" is the opening and closing theme music of "Ridiculousness," a show that airs on MTV literally dozens of times every week, so it's mind-boggling to contemplate how many times that song has been heard by millions of people in the past decade. 

One of the interesting things I learned recently was that Toni Basil was dating Gerard Casale in the early '80s when "Mickey" was a hit, and that song's parent album Word Of Mouth featured members of Devo backing her on three of their songs, including "Pity You" (retitled "You Gotta Problem") and the early Hardcore-era track "Space Girl Blues" (retitled "Space Girl"). 

Lately I've been reading Evie Nagy's excellent 33 1/3 book about Freedom Of Choice, and it's fascinating to hear about that album's genesis in granular detail, "Snowball" might be my #1 favorite Devo song. It's a bummer to hear the band talk about Duty Now For The Future as a misfire, though, some days I think it's actually my favorite Devo album, it's got loads of fantastic songs and sounds. I also included the non-album "Whip It" b-side "Turn Around," which was famously covered by Nirvana (as "Turnaround") on Incesticide. Speaking of covers by Seattle bands, The Posies have a fun cover of "Wiggly World." 

As someone who makes music with synthesizers and live drums, Devo is a big inspiration to me, especially those first 3 or 4 albums before they started using drum machines heavily. The late Alan Myers was just an incredible drummer, he helped Devo really become a rock band (there's a big contrast between the Hardcore Devo stuff before he joined the band and what they made after) but he was really coming up with interesting patterns that no other rock drummer of the era was, even the way Devo plays non-4/4 time signatures is different from other bands. It's kind of remarkable, for something that kind of started as a multi-media art project that was not meant to be primarily a touring and recording band, Devo's music is so good just by itself, whether or not you're taking in all the videos and conceptual stuff or the philosophy informing the songs. 

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