Feeling despondent about being dragged into another war in the Middle East? I am. Except this time around it's even worst than the last because our commander-in-chief is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and I supported him in the last two presidential campaigns.
All the big lies from the Bush II era are back. And the overall message is that there is no hope. You can put a black man in the White House, a child of a single mother, a one-time community organizer from the working-class metropolis of Chicago; you can knock on doors, donate your measly scraps of legal tender, elect who you think is the best candidate, and it won't make a shit of difference. No doubt about it. The verdict is in. We have no future except the future of more lies leading to more wars, suffering, death.
These were my thoughts heading out at lunch for a walk in the late August sunshine. I had my iPod on song shuffle. "Blockhead" began playing. "Yes!" I thought. "That's the answer!"
Last week I was rescued from a birthday chocolate cake slough of despond by Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978). What was called for was Devo's second album, Duty Now for the Future (1979), at high volume. Our future might be a grim Terminator landscape of drones monitoring and destroying us from above but at least, for the time being, there's recorded music.
In the early 1990s I read a book about artificial intelligence that contained a Marvin Minsky quote in its introduction that I've always remembered. It went something like this: "Don't talk to me of the illegal drug use in this country until we have a discussion about all the music CDs being sold every year."
Ah, yes. And I read this at a time before Windows 95. I had just seen up close the effect Apple Macs had on the publishing industry in New York City. They radically altered the traditional production department at magazines, newspapers and book publishers, wiping out paste-up artists, keypunchers, proofreaders and copy editors. What did Minsky have to say about the iPod when it appeared ten years later? Now everyone is AI enhanced with ear buds affixed almost constantly (at least in public).
Duty Now for the Future was ahead of its time. I remember listening to it as a lower division undergraduate one dark and rainy Friday night in the late fall early 1980s and thinking, "There's something about this that I can't get a handle on, something queer." And nothing captures better what I was experiencing then than "Smart Patrol"/"Mr DNA."
Like Are We Not Men? Duty Now for the Future is guitar driven. But what to make of all those synthesizers? I think that's where I was getting caught up. Now, thirty years later, it sounds completely normal and appropriate. And it completely kicks ass. No wonder Henry Rollins spent some sweat equity in the 1990s to put out the album for the first time in CD format in the United States.
As first two albums go, Devo shapes up equal to or better than such Punk/Post-Punk avatars as Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Wire, The Clash, Public Image Ltd and (if you allow me to toss in 2 Tone) The Specials -- all groups who had amazingly strong first and second records.
Tonight walking home up the hill from downtown into my urban neighborhood of young hipsters, everyone out on a sunny Friday after work drinking, smoking, enjoying themselves, seemingly oblivious to the huge dialectical shift underway: our "deep politics" are now laid bare and war -- the machinery of war -- is exposed.
Our duty now for the future is to withhold our support for such a system. No more being seduced by mellifluous Barack Obama corporate Democrats.
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