“We’re just the house band going down with the Titanic, playing your favorite tunes as we all go down.”
The history of Devo, the misunderstood iconoclast multimedia pioneers of punk, is far complicated than scores composed for Rugrats. Reached by phone earlier this week, Devo co-founder Jerry Casale cut into the grit about Donald Trump without hesitation (or espresso). “He’s a blustering, idiotic developer-businessman-entrepreneur who hoodwinked everybody, has been bankrupt four times, gotten himself into a mountain of debt,” Casale said, sounding groggy but perking up as the caffeine hits. “It’s proof of Devolution of our entire culture.”