DEVO, part 1/3: https://www.leighspence.net/2025/09/its-not-to-late-to-whip-it-511.html
This referred to the term in office of the 45th President of the United States, well before their replacement and re-election. I continued: “What I do know is that everything will find its centre, or equilibrium once more, even if it has to make a new one, as people take stock of where everything has reached.” I later clarified that, “I hope it is clear that this isn’t a repudiation of the way politics is currently conducted in the United States, but of the way conduct is currently conducted.”
The heavy subject matter was my recognising how the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction” was confused with “destruction”, a continuing reassessment over wholesale replacement: “Derrida had to explain that the notion of there being a ‘centre’ was a functional one, as there had to be a centre that helped to form our understanding. Then again, when all you have is the text, the words, to hand, you have to see them in the sense of how they have been used.” This led on to the President’s choice of words in public, on social media, and so on.
The title I gave this article was “You’ll Never Live It Down Unless You Whip It”, incorrectly contracting “You will” from the lyrics of DEVO’s biggest hit in the United States – in the UK, it was their cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, but more about that later.
I always understood “Whip It” as being more than the cracking of a whip – the second line is “give the past a slip”, an immediate clue that something else is up here – but the song’s video, of a woman’s clothes being whipped away from them, was DEVO’s giving in to the literal and sexual interpretation made by people of the lyrics, rather than accepting them as faux motivational statements that mask the use of violence to solve problems. Infamously, the later song “Through Being Cool” is aimed at “the ninnies and the twits” that misunderstood DEVO in the wake of “Whip It”, the lyrics as playfully direct as possible: “Waste those who make it tough to get around”, and “Put the tape on erase / Rearrange a face / We always liked Picasso anyway”.
I am sure I have previously said that I use song lyrics to title these articles as a primitive mode of search engine optimisation, catching people searching for what they think they have heard. DEVO have also talked about using the tactics of Madison Avenue advertising in getting their message about de-evolution to people. But what both things appear to prove is that people don’t listen closely to lyrics, but those who do are justly rewarded.
One of the best song lyrics I have heard comes from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: “Well I’m watching my TV, and a man comes on and tells me how white my shirts can be, but he can’t be a man ‘cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.” Richards was asked about this line in 1971, in an interview with “Rolling Stone" magazine, and he starts sounding like me talking about Jacques Derrida:
“A lot of them are completely innocent. I don’t think that one is. It might have been. I don’t know if it was a sly reference to drugs or not. After a while, one realizes that whatever one writes, it goes through other people, and it’s what gets to them. Like the way people used to go through Dylan songs. It don’t matter. They’re just words. Words is words.”
An ongoing theme on this website, since the first article in May 2016, is “all they have are words”, and everything that means. Now that writing about DEVO, a band for whom “In The Beginning Was The End”, has brought me back around to where I started, I feel that, next time, I need to see how I should follow another of their statements: “mutate, don’t stagnate”.
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