On a whim, I picked up a DVD collection of DEVO videos last night. I was probably inspired by a brief discussion with the Cartoonist about bands that wear matching uniforms onstage.

Now I have to confess that I'm not a huge fan of DEVO. I never saw them when they played the club circuit in LA back in the late Seventies because the band and their fans had a serious rep for violence...yup, you heard me right...violence. A friend of mine was badly injured at one of their early shows at the Whiskey in Hollywood after Mothersbaugh leapt off the stage and cut a huge gash in his head with a guitar. At the hospital, the Whiskey's manager (El Arsehole Supremo, Kim Fowley) actually tried to strongarm him into signing an injury waiver so he couldn't sue them! Needless to say, these kind of antics didn't endear the band to me at all.

Nevertheless, their music has grown on me over the years, sorta like a crotch fungus, and I have purchased and enjoyed a couple of their albums. So I thought that viewing some of their old videos might be fun. Boy, was I wrong. I had forgotten how grainy and headache-inducing ancient video technology is on the eyeballs, especially when viewed at high-resolutions, and their de-evolution schtick seems pretty lame now in retrospect. My kids fell asleep watching it with me, and I came pretty close to nodding off myself. Unfortunately, their best video "Are You Experienced" wasn't even included in the collection, and the rest of their back catalogue (with the possible exception of "Whip It") is extremely amateurish and poorly produced. At least they could've done a little post-production clean-up to get rid of the horrible bluescreen artifacts and remixed the sound.

I've also never forgiven Mothersbaugh for scoring Rugrats. Sir, have you no shame, no sense of decency? You could have at least embedded a low-frequency tone into that sappy, tinkly theme song that induces instant diarrhea in viewers à la the comment Casale made years ago during their legendary (and apparently unwebified) interview with William S. Burroughs in Trouser Press.

Oh yeah, during my search for DEVO-related linkage to go with this post, I stumbled upon this ironic gem; kind of like forming a club for underachieving students and naming it the Subgeniuses or something, eh?