‘Whip It’: The Devo song written as an imitation of Thomas Pynchon
Where do you even begin with Devo? A band so undeniably clever—yet entirely devoid of the ego that such brilliance usually brings. In fact, you get the distinct sense they’d prefer to be remembered as “the guys with the funny hats who did ‘Whip It’” simply because it’s funnier than legions of fans endlessly reminding you how influential and groundbreaking they were. And to be clear, they were intensely clever and massively influential. Akron’s original favourite sons have been covered by artists as varied as Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine, and anyone who’s ever directed a music video owes them a serious debt of gratitude.
That’s one hell of a shadow to cast, wouldn’t you agree?
The band started as they intended to go on, as part art project, part joke. Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis were both students at Kent State University who’d been creating satirical art pieces around the concept of de-evolution. Upon meeting local keyboard player Mark Mothersbaugh, they decided to combine their artistic ambitions with Mark’s musical ambitions, naming the project by taking the term de-evolution and…devolving it.
In a sign of how forward-thinking this band truly was, their first act as a full-time group up wasn’t to start recording an album. It was to start making a movie. Their 1976 short film The Truth About De-Evolution won a prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and attracted the attention of both Neil Young and David Bowie. 1978 saw the release of their Brian Eno-produced debut album, the fabulously titled Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, but it wasn’t until the 1980s and the rise of MTV that they began attracting national attention.
Which makes sense, when you get a band as forward thinking as Devo, sometimes you’ve got to wait for the world to catch up. When the nascent MTV began airing, they had a problem: very few artists had actually been making music videos, let alone releasing them. The company were scrambling to fill their air time, and Devo had a bunch of music videos ready to go. The stars had aligned and, against all odds, this most niche of bands had a shot at the big time, all they needed was a hit.
In true Devo fashion, their hit was inspired by panicking about the state of US politics and the works of Thomas Pynchon. Y’know, the usual suspects. As noted by Songfacts, Mothersbaugh and Casale both went deep into what inspired the classic new wave jam. Mothersbaugh said, “Everybody was totally freaked out by American politics and American foreign policy. At the time, Jimmy Carter was in charge. I thought of ‘Whip It’ as kind of a Dale Carnegie, ‘You Can Do It’ song for Jimmy Carter.”
Casale was even more specific: “The lyrics were written by me as an imitation of Thomas Pynchon’s parodies in his book Gravity’s Rainbow. He had parodied limericks and poems of kind of all-American, obsessive, cult of personality ideas like Horatio Alger and ‘You’re number one, there’s nobody else like you’ kind of poems that were very funny and very clever. So I thought I’d like to do one like Thomas Pinchon, so I wrote down ‘Whip It’ one night.”
It didn’t do much for Carter’s campaign in the end, but it still made for one of the most beloved tracks of the early ’80s. Whether you know it as one of the premier art pop satires of its time or that weird cowboy video with the killer riff, I’m sure either is fine for the band themselves.
