DEVO has to be one of the most under‑appreciated bands that I can think of, in my personal experience anyway.
A fair amount of people when I bring up DEVO will either respond simply with a "Who?" or a "Oh yeah that's the 'Whip It' band!", but DEVO was and is far more. They were on the bleeding edge of the punk scene in the late 70s and early 80s and were major pioneers in the New Wave genre, just to name a few things.
Hidden under the quirky and fun surface of their squelchy guitars and bleepy bloop synth tones lies a powerfull anti‑corporate and anti‑facist message that still unfortunately rings true to this day. A lot of people like to say that the equally excellent film "Idiocracy" by Mike Judge has become more and more of a prophetic documentary as time goes on (and they're not wrong), but DEVO's been ringing that particular alarm bell for decades, trying to enlighten the masses to the pitfalls and potential dangers of our ever dumbifying society.
Lyrically I consider them to be one of the greats, the song "Freedom of Choice" is a prime example of their turn of phrase writing style, where the thesis of the song doesn't come into full clarity until the final chorus. What starts out sounding like a song about celebrating your personal freedoms and how cool America is *ahem* "de-volves" *ahem* into the reality that most humans are lazy and when confronted with the power of absolute freedom just end up wanting their hands held and their decisions made for them.
DEVO's tone experimentation is another big draw and inspiration for me, I'm a sucker for synths and circuit bending and I consider them to be up there with bands like "Kraftwerk" and "Silver Apples" as far as that's concerned. They also experimented on a budget at first, using what they had available to them. I think I remember hearing in an interview that the only reason they had more guitar in their earlier stuff was because having guitar pedals for their tones was cheaper than good synthesizers.
So yeah, I think DEVO's pretty neat and if you're not already a fan of theirs, I hope ya check 'em out!
