“Cowboy Kim”: the strange fan mails that lead to a Devo classic
By 1982, Devo had ensconced themselves in the pop charts with their subversive bite still intact.
Fame and commercial fortunes had come to them by accident at the decade’s start. Long existing as a satirical multi-media project well before punk’s arrival, art students Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale could scarcely have believed just how far their de-evolution theory would take them back in 1970.
Yet, the new wave would indeed offer a crucial context to Devo’s electronically coated anti-rock, setting the stage for 1978’s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! debut after years slogging their act to flummoxed, and at times infuriated, crowds.
A little song called ‘Whip It’ didn’t hurt either. With a history as a video outfit before their first album was out, Devo’s eye-popping promos that accompanied 1980’s Freedom of Choice were unwittingly ready to feed a ravenous MTV monster waiting around the corner, ready to thrust the group to the fore of the US pop sphere. With a zingy video and insanely hooky bounce, ‘Whip it’ catapulted them a little too close to the mainstream sun for their liking.
What followed was a subtle undoing of their Billboard flirtation. Still able to knock out piquant tunes charged with their unmistakable gift for angular, jabby synthhooks, Devo would carve darker and more anguished material on 1981’s New Traditionalists, a cavernous descent into industry fatigue and the expectation that now surrounded them in light of ‘Whip It’s’ MTV domination.
Jumping back with Oh, No! It’s Devo the following year, the Ohio subversives seemed to take a deep dive into synthpop at its peppiest. Yet, their fifth LP glared with sting the closer one peered at their lyrical affrontery. Amid their mechanised collage of chunky electro, the record hid numbers exploring Jungian philosophy, examinations of poems written by attempted Ronald Reagan assassinator John Hinckley Jr, and a curiously strange tale involving eerie fan letters.
The letters weren’t sent to Devo, but to a friend of the band’s who processed fan mail sent to game show hosts in Los Angeles. Referring to themself as “Cowboy Kim”, the series of scrawled messages expressed in a disjointed and chaotic manner the paranoia felt by Kim at the centre of a perceived social collapse and personal disintegration.
“I am a lucky cowboy, I am Mr Reality,” one letter opens with. Elsewhere, such eerie, fragmented notations appear, errors included: “I am the busy Celebrity cowboy, I am 26 yrs old. The Cowboy Kim show is great Cowboy Kim’s show is super…A good cowboy I am. The cowboy hat is my working hat…The cowboy hat is the hat for being head boss of show business…The Cowboy Kim radio show’s a super show.”
Anyone familiar with Oh, No! It’s Devo will realise that Cowboy Kim’s scribbled thoughts form the lines of ‘Big Mess’, one of the album’s finest synthpop moments and a standout cut for the band. Behind ‘Big Mess’ spongey pop, however, lurks the unsettling words of a game show obsessive with possible mental health issues.
