Devo's Freedom of Choice (33 1/3)

Nagy, Evie

ISBN 10: 1623563445 / ISBN 13: 9781623563448

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2015

About this Item

Seller Inventory # mon0003719735

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Devo's Freedom of Choice (33 1/3)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1623563445
• ISBN 13: 9781623563448
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.

Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devo's last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts from the band and musical analysis set against an examination of new wave's emergence, the first-ever authorized book about Devo (with a foreword by Portlandia's Fred Armisen) explores the group's peak of success, when their hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, and plenty of misunderstandings. "Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence–it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number," says Casale. "It's where everything changes."

About the Author

Evie Nagy is a music, culture and business journalist who has been a staff editor and writer at Rolling Stone, Billboard and Fast Company. Her work was published in Best Music Writing 2010, and she co-wrote the afterword to Out of the Vinyl Deeps, an anthology of rock writing by the late Ellen Willis, the New Yorker's first pop music critic. She currently lives in Oakland, CA.