jerry, how could you

oh man.

i saw a commercial for what i thought would be the deleriously wonderful Devo 2.0 on the tv. this led me to the the website (http://devo2-0.com). a fairly competent bunch of kids covering devo songs, and hey, a girl as the lead singer. why not! most of the performances seemed pretty good for a bunch of 12 year olds, even the drummer (all-important for devo). at first i was amazed. how awesome that DISNEY of all people is pushing songs like "freedom of choice" on youngsters. the videos reveal that the kids don't quite have the insane energy of the original band, and that the keyboard girl probably shouldn't be singing. but hey, i'll take what i can get; and there are even references to potatoes! so what if they made it "freedom of choice is what you want" instead of "freedom from choice"; the basic message is largely intact, and besides they're not the first. also, the two new songs aren't bad.

then i got to the beautiful world video.

let me be clear: i was not expecting them to leave the S&M stuff in "whip it". i was not expecting them to cover "jocko homo" at all, lest have the kids rolling around in giant condoms in the video. and i was definitely not expecting this version of beautiful world to live up to the original. i was surprised they even dared to include it. the original is easily among the greatest music videos ever made. i was CERTAINLY not expecting images of starving african children and men being blown up with grenades. but holy crap; they changed "it's a beautiful world for you, but not for me" into "for you, i guess me too."

ugh.

this pretty much renders the song completely pointless. i'm wondering why they bothered to cover it. couldn't they just stick to the less obviously politically perverse stuff if they were going to strip the songs of any signifigance whatsoever? how are mark mothersbaugh and jerry casale (who directed the videos!) justifying this to themselves? are they telling themselves the song is just even more ironic now? come on.

i think it says a lot that much of the sexual stuff made it through. they toned down "girl u want" a bit, and also made a "boy u want" version which is pretty fun. but they also covered "uncontrollable urge" and "jerkin back and forth." what the hell. granted, devo's "sexy" songs are mostly about sex as a primal instinct which shows us for what we really are, but i think that's exactly what's going on here. the establishment is fine with sexualized youth (regardless of what they say) because sex sells. a primal society is a controllable society.

to their credit, they did steer clear of what is probably the least ironic of their "protest" songs, "gates of steel." i only hope this leads some kids to go find the first devo album, which is among the most awesomely mind bending listening experiences in rock and roll.

bonus points go to the bass player, who in his website bio wrote "Maybe I could be the singing, guitar-playing, bass-playing DEVO-Ninja."