Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh – HuffPost 7.20.10

[Note: This is taken from my interview with Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and it contains an informative perspective, made back in 2010.]

Mike Ragogna: Would you describe your early style as new wave, punk…

Mark Mothersbaugh: …you know, we never really did. We never really thought of ourselves as a punk band either but they were contemporary to us, so we found ourselves playing venues with Punk bands and with New Wave bands and we got along with them.

MR: You were definitely in that grey area in between those.

MM: Yeah, we were kind of the abject prop band of the late Seventies and Eighties, so we weren’t really fashionable. We were really more of a theatre project than a band, and we really didn’t even start out to be a band. We thought Devo was going to be like the Akron, Ohio, version of Andy Warhol’s “Factory.” We thought that we weren’t even going to have to go on stage and play music. We thought we were going to be able to write songs, put together a visual show centered on the topic of de-evolution and what’s happening to our planet and our species, and write fun songs to dance to and listen to that also had something else going on in them. And we’d have four or five Devo’s going out. When I look back at the notebooks that Gerald and I used to make up, we were thinking kind of like a Blue Man Group of Rock ‘n’ Roll in a way. We thought we were going to be sending out other people to do it and we wouldn’t have to go on the road…when we signed with the record company, they didn’t really understand that at all either. Even on much more obvious issues, nobody got why we were making these films with our songs in them. Why would you want to do that? You know?

MR: And then look what happened.

MM: Yeah. There wasn’t an MTV yet.

[Note: Here is another excerpt from the interview.]

MM: The internet had changed everything. No longer are kids waiting for EMI Records or Warner Bros. Records to say, “Okay, we’re going to re-release this record now.” They can go to the Internet and they can find everything, it’s all available. And I think that’s pretty great. I think it’s an exciting time to be an artist; I think this is an exciting time to be making music. I wish this was the way it was when I was a kid, I wish the internet existed. YouTube is much more exciting than MTV ever was…I thought MTV was a big disappointment when it came along. I had all these dreams of it being much more exciting and something that was going to change pop culture in a big, meaningful way. Instead, it just allowed a lot of old dinosaurs to coast for a while…I think, for all the warts and creepy aspects of the internet, it’s a great time to be making art, I think it’s a great medium to work in. We’ll see what happens when the Chinese decide they’re going to blow all the satellites out of the air and we can’t get our connections anymore. But until that happens, I think it’s a really interesting time. I’d love to be twenty years old right now.