Author(s): Evie Nagy; Fred Armisen (Foreword by)

Music | 33 1/3

Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.
Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devo's last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code- dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts and musical analysis set against an examination of New Wave's emergence, this book explores Devo's peak of success, when the band's hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, lots of cocaine and the occasional violent Italian dwarf. Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence - it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and thinking they had our number, says Casale. It's where everything changes.