How Thomas Pynchon inspired Devo’s biggest hit
It never seemed like Devo were going to be much of a mainstream concern. The five-man Akron experimental rockers were nerdy, boundary-pushing, and purposefully anti-consumerist. From their shared uniforms to their robotic mannerisms to their angular riffs, Devo was also destined to be a cult phenomenon. But in 1980, something strange happened: Devo got an honest-to-god hit single.
‘Whip It’ was just as strange as any other Devo song. With its seemingly obvious sadomasochistic overtones and rubbery guitar riff, ‘Whip It’ seemed like it was made to stay as far away from the pop charts as possible. But its hooky verses and completely unique sound struck a chord with audiences who weren’t aware of the band’s de-evolutionary politics and strange themes.
“‘Whip It’, like many Devo songs, had a long gestation, a long process,” co-writer Jerry Casale said. “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 #1, there’s nobody else like you’ kind of poems that were very funny and very clever.”
“I thought, ‘I’d like to do one like Thomas Pynchon,’ so I wrote down ‘Whip It’ one night,” Casale added. “Mark had recorded some sketches for song ideas in his apartment, and when we’d get together every day to write, rehearse and practice, we would listen to everybody’s snippets of ideas. He had this tape with about eight things on it, and one of them had a drum beat that was very interesting, it became the ‘Whip It’ drum beat.”
With a looping drum beat from Alan Myers and shared lead vocals from Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, ‘Whip It’ was so uncharacteristic of standard pop music that it became an entity all its own. When the song was initially released in 1980, it became one of the first major hits to come out of new wave. An accompanying video saw recurring plays when MTV was launched a year after its release. For Casale, the song’s success came completely by surprise.
“Then three other songs had pieces of what became the ‘Whip It’ song, except they were in different time signatures and different tempos. I put them all together into one composition,” he explained. “All the parts of the song got rolled into one song. Then we started putting the lyrics over the top of it and liked the idea of how it was working out.”
“We started practicing it every day, until we got it to the point where we really liked it and we thought it was really snappy,” he added. “Then we recorded it. We didn’t like it any better or any less than any of the other songs we were doing, and we had no idea it would become a hit.”
Reaching number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, ‘Whip It’ became Devo’s one and only top 40 hit of their career. Although the band quickly returned to cult status, the legacy of ‘Whip It’ continued, so much so that the band continued to feature the song in all of their live sets from 1980 onward. The band even managed to spin off a teenage group of musicians named DEV2.0, who dutifully performed ‘Whip It’ in their short careers.
Check out ‘Whip It’ down below.
