Open Culture is a truly great site. Today they posted a short but thought-provoking piece on Devo, late-capitalism, and the dark comedy of humanism.

The concepts are aggressively wink-nudge adolescent, reflecting not only Devo’s take on the regressive state of the culture, but also Casale’s belief that “high-school kids know everything already.”

I’ll admit that I didn’t get it when they first hit the scene. I was in high school, cynical, disaffected, and generally pissed off. When I listen to Devo now I think they may have been the only band of their era who really knew what was going wrong, and where it would all end up.