What Would DEVO Do?

Go ahead, ask yourself: what would DEVO do? Scan your library of life lessons collated by the band that traded in their kneepads, their armor and exuberant stage dives for hazmat suits topped with pyramidal resonator helmets (these--perhaps their single most striking oddity of affectation, resembling nothing so much as inverted plastic flower pots--they don them without ceremony, with modesty and grim commitment to their post--service, we should never forget, so we won't have to similarly serve) and accompanied by their now signature chanting robotic choreography, one that mirrors nothing so much as the workaday whirlwind reflexive responses, the essential rhythms and syncopated seizures of middle class white America, tipping off toward its inevitable fall, glimpsed there just at the cusp of its suburban apex of influence, the strap beginning to slip into destiny, a legacy of never again. We are assured, however, in our helpless twilight, that though the death throes of kulture will surely be characteristically ugly, yet that DEVO will be on-site sorting through the debris, picking up after the disaster, restoring what dignity may remain somewhat serviceable, performing their knowing spiritual triage and driving the still careening ambulance of state, pell-mell with due discipline, one could say, straight on through to the funerary.