In the 1932 horror film Island of Lost Souls Dr. Moreau, a scientist experimenting with transforming animals into something close to human, cracks his whip. This is what separates him from the other beings on the island.
The film, adapted from H.G. Wells’ novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, is a lesser seen, but much acclaimed, document of early horror cinema. It’s best remembered for a repeated line that Moreau’s creations recite at the prompting of the whip: “Are we not men?” He wants them to become something other than what they are. He wants this one response to become their definition. They have no freedom to object. So they repeat: “Are we not men?”
This question, and its answer, had little impact on me when I first saw the film. It was 2010, I was going on sixteen, and sitting in a high school classroom. More interesting to me was why my English class was watching yet another movie instead of reading. I wanted to find meaning in art and all of the world around me, but I didn’t see it in a forced viewing of a black-and-white film.
Outside school, in my suburban piece of middle America, I didn’t see meaning either.
It’s a well-known but unspoken fact that every city is famous for something. But usually that something is someone else’s interpretation of nothing.
The maybe-famous-nothings are documented by plaques honoring old buildings and the forgotten people who lived there. The businesses take on local myths and titles in their names. Pizza parlors hang up signed pictures of athletes, newscasters—anyone who made it out but then came back long enough to enjoy a slice.
The purpose of these photos is never clear to me. The people are novel because they started here and went so far and because they have gone so far but still come back. The photos seem to promise the chance of escaping to somewhere better at the same time as they swear this is a place worth staying. I don’t find them convincing. To visitors and outsiders, it all looks somewhat pitiful. Interpretations are often a matter of distance.
What I mean to say is that we all have false notions of importance, and at the same time we all ignore so much importance. I am guilty of it too—Ohio alternately impressing and depressing me.
Six-and-a-half miles from the house where I grew up, a music store hung signed records, drumheads, and setlists above the door and tried to convince the shoppers that real art could come from here. There were signatures from the Dayton band Guided by Voices, but I’d fled from Catholic school a few years prior and had no interest in being guided by the voices of a trinity or any other group. I remember, perhaps falsely, signatures from Kim Deal of the Pixies and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders. But the Pixies were from Boston and the Pretenders from England. None of it convinced me.
I saw Ohio, instead, for all its ugly blemishes. I believed it was the home of only minor flukes and oddities. I didn’t believe that Ohio was a place of no hope, but I believed that all truly good in my midwestern home came from quiet secrets we made for ourselves—the songs we wrote and sang in basements. I believed that life would be better someday because life—the real life, the one I was expecting—would take place somewhere else, in a place where all that is good comes from. That life could start in an instant, at the snap of fingers or the click of heels.
Because of this, I left.
I fled to the coast, six hundred and ten miles to a record label in New Jersey, with an office looking out across the Hudson River into New York City. On my first day, one of the two full-time employees turned to me and said Who’s the best band in Ohio. I tried to answer, but this was a misinterpretation. He was not asking me, because it was not a question. The answer, he informed me, was Pere Ubu. I did not know who Pere Ubu was. But he allowed one possible alternative: You know Devo, right?

I don’t know when, but at some point, probably in the sixties, Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh watched Island of Lost Souls too. They saw in it a direct reflection of a theory they were developing about the state of humanity: Human-like creatures progressing toward some human ideal, then regressing backward. The human species itself a false ideal. Meanwhile, some greater power keeping everything in strict obedience.
They heard the whip crack and they listened closely to the question: “Are we not men?”
This is before Casale and Mothersbaugh knew what to do with their ideas. But the answer to the question was on the tips of their tongues. It wasn’t a matter of evolution, becoming more human, it was the opposite: de-evolution.

You likely know Devo for their 1980 hit single, “Whip It.”
“Whip It” peaked at number fourteen on the billboard charts the week of November 15, 1980. It’s often remembered as a novelty song. In some ways, it is, but in others it’s not. “Whip It,” one might say, is novel as one of the only hit songs to document presumptions of ope-ing midwestern manners: The guitar chatters with robotic enthusiasm but freezes for a synthesizer’s opulent reply. The vocalists, Casale and Mothersbaugh, squeal in turns. One voice, then another—inhuman, but polite. I don’t mean the Midwest is inhuman, but Devo certainly is, and “Whip It” certainly is. It’s expressively rigid, emphatically cartoonish. It’s a caricature of misinterpretations. It’s possibly about masturbation.
It’s all of this in a little over two and a half minutes.
A healthy resting heart beats sixty to one hundred times per minute. “Whip It” moves at one hundred and sixty beats per minute, the heart rate of a twenty-year-old exercising vigorously. (And the drummer is doing exactly that.) The No. 1 song when “Whip It” reached its pinnacle of popularity—“Lady,” written by Lionel Richie and performed by Kenny Rogers—moved at only half the pace and clocked in a minute longer.
“Whip It” seems to want things to progress faster than possible. It documents a call and response. The whip cracks and no one replies “are we not men?” but suggestions are given: Straighten up. Keep moving. Forward. It’s not too late.
The track is a common, offhand example of a one hit wonder. But I’d like to remind you that interpretation is a matter of distance. I would like to remind you that every few Halloweens you still see someone in a black turtleneck and a red geometric dome hat. I would like to remind you that Devo did chart two other songs, “Working in a Coal Mine” and “Theme From Doctor Detroit,” though neither broke the top forty, and neither were available on a studio album.
The argument against the one hit wonder label is an argument of misinterpretation. It’s an argument about failing to see what Devo truly is.

In 1978, the “dean of American rock critics” ventured out of the hallowed castle of New York to investigate a new sound leaking out of a barren, distant land called Ohio.
“What’s going on in Akron-Cleveland right now is probably an accident,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice. “There’s even a possibility that bands in other cities are making rock and roll every bit as good and not recording it—but I doubt it.”
If you are not from Ohio, you might not know anything about Akron, you might not have even heard of Akron. If you are from Ohio but not from Akron, you might know it as the rubber city. It is the birthplace of Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, General Tire, and not much else. (Cleveland, though historically more focused on steel and other industry, is home to the world’s largest rubber stamp.) This made Christgau’s (noncommittal) claim, and Devo’s unexpected rise, all the more impressive and perplexing.
As the scene’s major acts—Devo, Pere Ubu, and the Dead Boys—spread beyond their corner of declining middle America, they offered an answer to punk that was eclectic, unpretentious, and bordering unhinged. While the New York post-punks were art school kids adopting the confrontational qualities of punk rock, the northern Ohio sect were rubber factory children experimenting with further strangeness. The Talking Heads debuted in collared shirts, Devo debuted in hazmat suits.
By the time Christgau visited the buckeye state, the key bands had already made their most influential albums and the scene was moving to a new stage of life. The Dead Boys had relocated to New York, seminal punk label Stiff Records was preparing to release The Akron Compilation, and Devo would immigrate to Los Angeles that same year.
This is where the challenge of the one hit wonder label begins. The title implies that were it not for one song, an artist would leave the cultural memory untouched. But that’s not true for Devo. For many, the band’s importance comes from before “Whip It” rather than after.
Devo birthed from the end of the sixties into the shadow of the 1970 Kent State massacre. The band’s founders were Kent State University students at the time and knew at least one of the four unarmed students killed by the Ohio National Guard. The young musicians saw the shooting as ominous support for their nascent theory of a de-evolving humanity willing to submit to loss of freedom.
As much a conceptual art project as a band, the group’s true debut was the 1976 film The Truth About De-Evolution. It took first prize at the influential Ann Arbor Film Festival the following year and established, in absurd visual form, Devo’s view of humanity. David Bowie and Iggy Pop took notice and helped the band land a record deal with Warner Bros., though Bowie ultimately relinquished most production duties to Brian Eno for the band’s 1978 debut album: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
The album, in the words of a contemporary Rolling Stone review, is “a definitive restatement of rock & roll’s aims and boundaries in the seventies.” It’s replying to the question “are we not men?” but the answer isn’t yes or no. It’s an attempt to answer something else entirely. It’s a vision of a new path for humanity, or at least popular music. Check the near unrecognizable cover of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The band performed the track on Saturday Night Live (the week after the Rolling Stones served as the musical guest, no less), debuting their yellow safety suits and animatronic stage presence to a dumbfounded American audience.
Are We Not Men is the greatest challenge to the one hit wonder pigeonholing. It is, in a critical sense, Devo’s high point. The album sets a path forward from punk that counters the jagged, gray posture of big city post-punks and the fluorescent commercialism that new wave (de-)evolved into. When Devo is given as a musical reference point, this is almost always the Devo in question.
The high-speed, angular, yelping sound has become the base of legions of bands since, especially in the Midwest, even prompting a wave of articles analyzing “devo-core” acts such as the Coneheads, Booji Boys, and D.L.I.M.C. And the Devo members’ arty pedigree has earned them a slew of soundtracking gigs including almost half of Wes Anderson’s filmography, Rugrats, Happy Gilmore, and The Lego Movie.

Before it had Devo, Ohio had Dean Martin, Doris Day, the Isley Brothers. Joe Walsh attended Kent State at the same time as some of Devo’s members. Maybe what Devo did was demonstrate a way to make art that didn’t rely on attention or success. Devo showed that creating could be important even in the distant land of middle America. And maybe this is more important than any one hit.
But distance is a matter of interpretation, and Devo didn’t see that much space between one thing and another.

In his Village Voice article lauding Akron and Cleveland as the birth of a “real new wave,” Christgau recounts a story where “a Warners exec told [Devo] that he liked to sign one ‘art band’ for every act he knew was going to sell three million, he was politely asked what art band would balance off Devo.” At least some of the band was happy to imagine a future where Devo might be a mass success.
The band moved to Los Angeles in 1978 and released one more album—Duty Now for the Future, a middling entry in the group’s legacy—before Freedom of Choice and “Whip It.” Till then, the executives who made decisions knew Devo for music videos, coordinated outfits, and heavy use of synthesizers—future staples of the eighties, but arty oddities at the time.
Following the commercial flop of their sophomore album, Warner warned Devo that without a hit, the band’s next album would be their last with the label. When Devo finished Freedom of Choice, Warner selected “Girl U Want” as the lead single, seeing it’s “My Sharona”-like guitar riff as the clearest path to success. This was, of course, a misinterpretation.
“Whip It” became one of the first hit songs to use a synthesizer as a lead instrument, and propelled Freedom of Choice to become one of the first major new wave albums (it peaked at number twenty-two on the Billboard 200 chart). MTV wouldn’t launch for another year—“music video” wasn’t even a term yet—but when the channel did join the airwaves, Devo already had a “Whip It” video ready that played up controversial misinterpretations of the song’s meaning. MTV helped the song chart for a second year in a row.
This is the Devo that most everyone knows.
The beauty about “Whip It” is that it’s not an outlier but rather a concentration of Devo. The mechanical drive, the vocals squeezed from Mickey Mouse, aphoristic double entendres. The lyrics contort and subvert meaning on par with anything else in their catalog. (Is it about masturbation? Sadomasochism? Supporting presidential candidate Jimmy Carter? Imitating Thomas Pynchon?) If you’ve listened to and enjoyed “Whip It,” you’d likely enjoy much of Are We Not Men. Maybe not quite as much, but enough.
“Whip It” is the brief glimpse the rest of the world took of Devo. Though it has so much of what made the band great and influential, on its own it calls more attention to other things: the costumes, the silly music video. But listeners can interpret as they want. As Devo says, it’s their freedom of choice.

The whip cracks and the question repeats. How to define the thing?
“Are we not men?” became a central rallying cry at the foundation of a midwestern band of misfits. What did it mean to see the sixties combust, the eighties looming, the factories closing? They asked the question again and again. But the answer was never yes or no: They’re Devo.
The whip cracks again and the question repeats: “Are we not men?”
But what’s more important, the crack of the whip or the way we reply?

Cameron Carr is a writer from Ohio. His work has recently appeared in the Missouri Review. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona and an editor at the Sonora Review. His favorite Devo lyric is "yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."