Reading, Watching, Listening 7/22/2025
A few words about DEVO
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So, the other day, I watched this new documentary, DEVO, about the band Devo. You may have heard of them. “Whip It,” you know. Those hats. What you may not have known is that Devo was formed out of the ashes of ‘60s leftist American radicalism. I had no idea. I learned it from the documentary—directed by American Movie icon Chris Smith—which starts, essentially, at Kent State, where Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were at school. They were there for the events with the National Guard, when four students were gunned down. They personally knew two of those students. It shattered them. Mothersbaugh says in the documentary that they found, in the aftermath, rebellion was obsolete.
Their response was a retreat from activism and direct action, toward philosophy and art. They had developed this idea of “de-evolution,” a description of what was happening to society under the thumb of the new hyper-capitalist imperialism taking hold on the world. Their art was a critique. Nobody actually heard it, despite all their attempts to make clear what the whole project was about.
As a documentary, DEVO is fine, but not especially good, as most documentaries about musicians are not very good. Advertising, really. Which adds an extra layer of disappointment, in that though the film depicts the tragedy of the band’s inability to convey their message, it doesn’t do much to interrogate their faulty premises. They claim to not identify as “punk,” because they don’t see themselves as nearly so nihilistic, but the conscious setting aside of activism for the relative safety of art doesn’t exactly smack of optimism. That they courted mainstream success in order to have their message reach wider audiences, only to be subsumed into all that corporate machinery, is not exactly an endorsement of their thinking or approach.
I thought a lot during the film of this bit in Adam Curtis’s film HyperNormalisation, in which he uses Patti Smith as an example of how left radicalism was neutered, transferring over to art and other means of self-expression. As Curtis describes it, the new individualism that emerged out of the ‘60s and through the ‘70s was at odds with the idea of collective political action. “Instead, Patti Smith, and many others, became a new kind of individual radical, who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment. They didn’t try and change it. They just experienced it.”
To my mind, there need not be a clash between liberal values of individualism as a mode of self-understanding and expression. Dynamism is born of individualism. But action, in any meaningful way, is a collective effort, and the shame of bands like Devo is that they confused one for the other, as though the ability to express oneself as an individual might wake people up to take their own set of individual actions against the de-evolution of the modern world. It was never thus.
Mad Men ended with the implication that Don Draper’s encounter with group therapy and meditation gave him a personal epiphany that led him to create the iconic “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” ad. It’s a great ad, with a beautiful message co-opted by corporate interest. It’s the expression of a man who finally figured at least a few things out about himself and his life, and maybe even made some changes—we don’t know what Don’s future looked like—but at the end of the day, the spirit of the ‘60s amounted to a Coca-Cola commercial. I could feel the spectre of Mad Men over DEVO, too. And Devo. The music was great, and the music videos were great, and some of the ideas were interesting, but what did it amount to politically decades on? They got rich. Mark Mothersbaugh went off to compose fantastic scores for movies. Casale directs commercials.
This week, Defector published my latest article, a feature profiling the team behind the excellent videos for Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign. Go check it out. It’s a piece I had a lot of fun working on, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out.
For the newsletter, I followed up the Mamdani campaign article with some thoughts and musings on having put the piece together and how I understood what his team accomplished.
Reading, Watching, Listening
So here’s what I’ve been consuming recently.