Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo

I don’t think I’ve ever fully acknowledged the importance of Saturday Night Live in exposing new artists to me. Allow me to do it now: Peter Tosh, Talking Heads, The B-52’s, Kate Bush, and Devo all entered and warped my little mind because my parents were lackadaisical enough to let me stay up late on Saturday night.
It took a few years to appreciate Devo. Actually, it was a friend in ’79 that made the first move towards Devolution. I think we were subconsciously competing against one another in who could get the best new thing first and he actually won out on a few occasions. I don’t even think he liked some of the shit all that much, it was just the idea that he could get a few cool albums before me that was satisfaction enough.
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was one of those albums that he, we’ll call him Tim because that’s his name, got through Columbia house. One of the other albums was by Kansas, so there you go.
I remember giving him a bunch of shit about Q/A, partly out of jealously and partly because I had no idea of what Devo was about. All I knew was that they had a guy with a golf hat on the cover, some character named Booji Boy on the record sleeve (along with some pretty cool Devo merchandise items you could buy), and a strange declaration of “actual size” typed across the golf dude’s forehead.
The music, specifically their cover of “Satisfaction,” was a little too much for my Cars-loving head to take at that age. So I berated Tim for getting such a juvenile and cartoonish album.
But the joke was on me, even if Tim didn’t fully appreciate what he had inadvertently discovered.
Which was a kick ass, quirky and unique rock album that defied a proper definition, so some lame-brain called it “new wave.” It was “new” because nobody at that point had the good sense to associate the athletic kids with pinheads (or “homos” for that matter), wrote songs about mongoloids that work among us, or people getting clobbered by falling satellites.
And nobody had an answer for the music either, with its strange time signatures, guitar/synth combinations fueled by nervous energy, all corralled by incredible hooks, Q/A is one of those albums that only later proved to be the classic album it was.
I understand it now, fully appreciate it, and listen to it quite regularly; when I start the album as I leave my driveway in the morning, it ends perfectly when I pull the car into the parking lot at work (but only because I have to forward past “Satisfaction” as it skips because of a scratch on the disc).
After I put away my unfounded dismissals, I allowed myself to become a spud. By high school, we sang “Mongoloid” on our way to speech contests, and by college Devo had become because fully realized heroes (thanks in large part to the Ryko released Hardcore, which featured an early look on Devo’s punky origins).
Perfectly produced by Brian Eno, Q/A’s brilliance lies in how it took these punk origins and honed them into something fairly complex. Their imagery, as humorous as it may be, only serves as a distraction to how brilliant this album really is and something that they’d never be able to come close to again.