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Devo - Jocko Homo

Devo - Jocko Homo Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
Released: 1978

Jocko Homo Lyrics

They tell us that
We lost our tails
Evolving up
From little snails
I say it's all
Just wind in sails

Are we not men
We are Devo
Are we not men
D-E-V-O
Are we not pins
We are Devo

Monkey men all
In business suits
Teacher and critics
All dance the ?

Are we not men
We are Devo
Are we not men
D-E-V-O
Are we not pins
We are Devo

D-E-VO
(I must repeat)
D-E-VO
(I must repeat)
D-E-VO
(I must repeat)
D-E-VO

Okay lets go

Writer/s: MOTHERSBAUGH, MARK ALLEN
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Jocko Homo

In our interview with Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale of Devo , Mothersbaugh told us: "'Jocko Homo' was one of the first songs I wrote for the band. The whole song was meant to be a theme song for the theory of de-evolution and for Devo, what we were about. It was meant to lay out the story right there. It was a collection of discussions we had where we sat around in Kent after students had been shot, and decided that what we were seeing happening on the planet, when we looked at the news and read the paper, was not evolution but was more appropriately described as de-evolution."

Jocko Homo means "Monkey Man." Mothersbaugh was a student at Kent State University when a friend gave him a pamphlet called "Jocko Homo, Heaven Bound King of the Apes." It was a religious pamphlet debunking evolution, explaining how absurd the idea was that a man would descend from a monkey. The pamphlet was printed in the '30s by a religious zealot from Rogers, Ohio. One of the pictures showed a devil pointing up a staircase that said "2 million years along the stairway to heaven." The devil had 'De-Evolution' written on his chest and was laughing and pointing up the stairs. The stairs had names like slavery, world war, drunkenness, adultery - it kept going with horrible attributes of man.

When we spoke with Devo co-founder Jerry Casale, he said: "That was kind of our position statement. It was our mission statement saying, 'Hey look, humans are making up stories about why we're here and how we got here and who we are and what our importance is and it's all basically rubbish, it's absurd. You don't know what's going on, and that's OK. In fact, if you admit you don't know what's going on and you admit there are alternative explanations for things, then you're already better off, and there's a lot of things you won't do because you'd quit believing in ridiculous things that drive you to actions that cause more pain and suffering in the world.' It was kind of a Dada, self-effacing kind of statement, like, 'Look, we're all pinheads here on this planet together.'"

Mothersbaugh told us: "The chorus that keeps repeating the 'Are we not men' is directly from the very first Island Of Lost Souls (1932). There were two remakes that were both tepid and not nearly as compelling as the original. The original had a mad scientist on a deserted Pacific Island where he operated on animals - beasts from the jungle, in a room called the House Of Pain. He operates on these beasts to try to raise them up on the evolutionary chart. It's a very painful operation and when he does this, you can hear them screaming in the middle of the night in the House Of Pain.

His biggest success was a female named Lota who used to be a panther, but these animals keep devolving backwards. Lota gets cat claws, and she knows she's devolving. He has to do a painful operation to bring her back again, but in the meantime you see all these characters that are like sub-human, half-animal, half-man creatures that stumble around the jungle. Some of them could hold menial jobs at the House Of Pain. At one point, they were walking in a line around a fire in the woods at night while the doctor's working in the House Of Pain, and they were casting shadows on the side of the House Of Pain, and I saw these shadows of these sub-human creatures just slouching past the wall, and I was like, 'Holy crap, I know all those people, they live here in Akron with me.' That's where the inspiration came from.

The mad scientist would crack a whip standing on a rock and all the animals would come to attention, and he'd go, 'What is the law?' Usually it meant one of them had broken the law, like bad dogs that aren't house trained yet. They would all go in kind of a humble fashion, 'Not to spill blood.' Then he would go 'Are we not men?' and he'd crack the whip again and then he goes, 'What is the law?' and they'd have another law they'd have to repeat like 'Not to eat flesh' or 'Not to walk on all fours.' Then he'd crack the whip again and go 'Are we not men?' So that's where the line came from. There were like, watered down, wussy versions of it in the later Islands Of Dr. Moreau stuff, but that was a really intense movie. If you were sitting in a living room in Akron, Ohio in 1972 with some quack religious pamphlet sitting on your lap, the next thing was easy."

Casale said in our interview: "We moved the debate sideways - you believe what you want, but we like this guy that said we're all descendants of cannibalistic apes that ate the brains of other apes and went crazy and lost their tails. That explained what we were looking at in the world better than Darwinism or Creationism."

Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was Devo's first album. It was produced by Brian Eno, who was in the band Roxy Music and also produced Talking Heads. He was an innovator of electronic, synthesizer-based music.

Jerry Casale: "We were kind of poetically explaining what it meant to be Devo, and what de-evolution was. We didn't see any evidence that man was the result of some never ending linear progress and everything was getting better. When we were growing up, the magazines would show the world in 1999, and it'd be this beautiful, futuristic, domed city with everybody going around in jets and space-cars. Everybody was fed and everybody was groomed and everybody seemed to have tons of money. It's such a joke, what really happened was: the planet got more and more overrun by population, greater gaps between the rich and the poor, more new diseases, decimation of the environment. It seemed like even though people were getting more 'free' information from television and newspapers, they were actually less informed, less thoughtful, and acting dumber. So we saw de-evolution. The fact that a bad actor could be elected president was more proof to us. Things have just gone downhill from there. We didn't really want it to all be true, instead it looks like de-evolution was clearly real. In retrospect, compared to what's going on today, Reagan looks like a serious guy."

With the exception of "Whip It," Devo didn't have any big hits, but their music was very influential and continues to be in demand for movies and commercials. Mothersbaugh runs a production company called Mutato Muzika, and has worked on the music for many movies, including Happy Gilmore, Rugrats, and Rushmore. Casale directed all of Devo's videos, and continues to work on music videos and commercials. He has directed music videos by The Cars, The Foo Fighters, Soundgarden and Rush.

Devo - Whip It

Devo - Whip It Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Freedom Of Choice
Released: 1980

Whip It Lyrics

Crack that whip
Give the past the slip
Step on a crack
Break your momma's back

When a problem comes along you must Whip It
Before the cream sits out too long you must whip it
When something's going wrong you must whip it

Now whip it into shape
Shape it up
Get straight
Go forward
Move ahead
Try to detect it
It's not too late to whip it
Whip it good

When a good time turns around you must whip it
You will never live it down unless you whip it
No one gets their way until they whip it
I say whip it whip it good
I say whip it whip it good

Crack that whip
Give the past the slip
Step on a crack
Break your momma's back

When a problem comes along you must whip it
Before the cream sits out too long you must whip it
When something's going wrong you must whip it

Now whip it into shape
Shape it up
Get straight
Go forward
Move ahead
Try to detect it
It's not too late to whip it into shape
Shape it up
Get straight
Go forward
Move ahead
Try to detect it
It's not too late to whip it
Whip it good

Writer/s: M. MOTHERSBAUGH, G.V. CASALE
Publisher: BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT US, LLC
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Whip It Song Chart

Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh formed Devo when they were at Kent State University. Jerry told us how this song came together:

"Whip It, like many Devo songs, had a long gestation, a long process. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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." (Here's our full Devo interview .)

This became a hit when it was picked up by a radio programmer from Florida. He played it on some stations there and created the buzz that made it a hit. Says Jerry: "It spread around the country. All the DJs and people hearing it assumed it was a song about beating off or sadomasochism, so we let them think that. We didn't want to ruin it and tell them the truth, because they just wouldn't get off on the truth."

When MTV launched in 1981, they had very few videos to choose from. Some European and Australian artists had been making videos, but very few came from US artists, and most of those were concert videos. Devo had been making interesting videos for a while because they thought Laser Discs were going to catch on and wanted to make film shorts with music soundtracks that people could watch on them. Laser Discs never caught on, but MTV did, which gave this video lots of exposure.

Jerry Casale: "We made a video to it for like $15,000 that was shot in our rehearsal studio. We kind of magnified that myth that this was a song about whipping and sadomasochism. We decided to make the video feed that popular misconception and had a lot of fun doing it. It was one of the few times Devo worked like that, usually we would start with a visual idea or story and write music to fit it. In this case, we didn't originally have a video idea for 'Whip It,' and when people started thinking it was a song about whacking off or sadomasochism, we had these quack books that we would collect from junk stores or vintage magazine stores that served as inspiration or jokes. There was this one magazine that I found in a store in Santa Monica. It was a 1962 men's girlie mag called Dude, I think.

There was a feature article on a guy who had been an actor and fell on hard times, he wasn't getting parts anymore. He moved with his wife to Arizona, opened a dude ranch and charged people money to come hang out at the ranch. Every day at noon in the corral, for entertainment, he'd whip his wife's clothes off with a 12-foot bullwhip. She sewed the costumes and put them together with Velcro. The story was in the magazine about how good he was and how he never hurt her. We had such a big laugh about it, we said, 'OK, that's the basis for the video. We'll have these cowboys drinking beer and cheering Mark on as he's in the barnyard whipping this pioneer women's clothes off while the band plays in the corral.'

Back then, nobody cared. MTV had just started up in three cities, we had already shot 5 videos before Whip It, and nobody cared. There was no industry around it, there were no gatekeepers, there was no pecking order, there were no video commissioners, there were no representatives going, 'No, you can't do that, we won't show that.' There wasn't enough money or power involved for anybody to care, so we were just considered crazy artists that went out and did whacko things. So we made the video and one day we started showing it in concerts and then MTV started playing it."

Mark Mothersbaugh told us: "We had just done our second world tour when we started writing our third album. The one thing that we were impressed with that we noticed everywhere around the world was that 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."

This was one of the first hit songs that used a synthesizer as the lead instrument.

Devo's music and videos were based on the concept of "De-Evolution," meaning that mankind is regressing. They dressed alike in their videos to convey the lack of individuality in the world. Said Casale, "I think a lot of Devo is in 'Whip It.' There's Americana mixed with something menacing, there's irony and humor, there's a hook and a big dance beat, there are interesting synth parts, lyrics that aren't the typical lyrics about getting laid or losing your baby. Although we weren't trying, it was a pretty concentrated dose of Devo in 'Whip It.'"

Jerry Casale: "From the beginning, on purpose, Devo was a multimedia idea. There was no name for 'Performance Art' at the time. That term didn't exist, although I think that's what we were doing when I look back at it. It's exactly that, Devo represented an attitude, a point of view, a philosophy. It was like combining film-making and theatrics and cutting-edge kind of synthesizers and rock beats all rolled into one big performance with a lifestyle message behind it, which was basically to beware of illegitimate authority and think for yourself. Hardly a revolutionary idea, but it turns out to be more revolutionary as people's freedoms are slowly eaten away."

In 2003, this was used in a commercial for Swiffer wet mops. In the ad, a woman cleans the house with a Swiffer while doing robotic motions like Devo. When her daughter, who appears to be a junior-high Goth girl, sees her, she says, "I hope it's not genetic."

Jerry's thoughts: "The concept of that commercial is a generation gap where 'Whip It' is being used as a put-down of the girl's mother. She's stuck in the '80s and swiffing away to Whip It and the kid thinks she's weird and is embarrassed by her. It's perfect that while Devo, when we came out we were a critical success and loved by people, we were pretty much overlooked by radio and MTV. MTV turned on Devo around 1981 and quit showing stuff and didn't want anything to do with us. They said, 'Unless your song's a hit, we're not playing your videos.' What's funny is, we never made any money, and only through publishing now are we making money, ironically for the wrong reason. But built into Devo was that comment on how society works and how people see things different ways and there is no one explanation of reality and that people do not share one logical idea of reality. This just proves it. We don't feel bad about the little bit of money that trickles to us now that we never got in the first place because they used these songs in a terrible way. It's almost more subversive because you go, 'This can't be, it's all wrong.' By misusing it so badly, they've created something that amuses us, entertains us."

Proctor & Gamble, who make the Swiffer, originally had them re-record this for the commercial as "You must swiff it," but their lawyers found out that copyrighting "Swiff It" and the product implications down the line could cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars, so they changed the lyrics to "You must Swiffer" so they wouldn't have to copyright "Swiff It."

Because of a bad publishing deal Devo made in 1978, they control only half the rights to their songs. When they allow their songs to be used in commercials, they insist on re-recording them so they can keep all the performance rights. In the Swiffer commercial, that is Mothersbaugh's vocal with lyrics written by Proctor & Gamble.

This has also been used in ads for Gateway, Twix and Pringles. In the Gateway commercial, the chairman of the company is driving an 18-wheeler with the Gateway cow riding shotgun. The cow produces a CD labeled "Cow Mix," and when they listen to it, this comes on and the chairman and the cow sing along. That ad is one of Mothersbaugh's favorites.

This was Devo's only hit, but they have a large cult following, and many of their songs have been resurrected for commercials. Members of Devo started a company called Mutato Muzika (www.mutato.com) that develops music for movies, TV shows and commercials. Jerry is a successful director, and has worked on videos by Rush, The Foo Fighters, Soundgarden and many others.

This song is playable in Donkey Konga for the Nintendo GameCube. (thanks, Matthew - Milford, MA)

Senior citizen singers the Del Rubio triplets made this song a big part of their stage show, performing it on acoustic guitars. They made many TV appearances in the '80s, usually performing in a campy style and wearing skimpy outfits.

The Brian Welch fronted nu-metal band Love and Death covered this in 2013 for their Between Here & Lost album. Their version features Matt Baird of the Arkanas hard rock band Spoken. Welch recalled to Noisecreep : "He was just in town during the recording and Jaren (Rauch, producer) mentioned it. He said it would be cool to have a guy to scream on there and so I totally tried it. You wouldn't believe it, at nine in the morning, he got up - you're hearing him with morning voice and everything and we just threw him on there."