We Are All DEVO: Netflix’s Surreal Dive Into De-Evolution

The De-Evolution is not coming — it is HERE, and your monkey brain can finally hear the hum. Chris Smith points the camera, but really it’s a surveillance device, tracking the zig-zag mutations of DEVO from Akron’s smokestacks to MTV’s whip-crack rubber world.

This is no rockumentary. This is an inoculation. Interviews peel back the yellow suits, revealing prophets disguised as pranksters. Archival footage flickers like transmissions from Planet Booji Boy. Akron, Ohio: Petri dish of collapse. “Whip It”: accidental anthem. Beyond: a map of the future disguised as absurdity.

Arena rock sought volume, power chords, and testosterone-fueled thunder. DEVO offered plastic hats, mechanical jerks, and truth bombs smuggled inside toy keyboards. The crowd laughed, but the message went over their heads — mutate or die, spuds.

This Netflix transmission portrays DEVO as not a parody but a prophecy. Every syncopated squawk, every bent video frame was a warning: society is not evolving upward but spiraling downward, back into monkey suits and corporate banana farms. Their music wasn’t a soundtrack. It was an alarm clock.

We smell sausage!

DEVO mastered the interzone — music fused with video, flesh fused with circuitry, art fused with satire until the boundaries melted like a vinyl record left in the sun. They were anti-rock in the age of rock, anti-cool in the temple of cool, the tricksters who told the truth while everybody else played dress-up.

Now, as the band winds down, they leave behind not nostalgia but residue — a sticky, radioactive smear across the cultural landscape. They proved that absurdity is the sharpest scalpel, that weirdness is a weapon, that we are ALL DEVO.

De-evolution was never a gag. It was the blueprint. The question is not whether DEVO was right. The question is whether you’ve noticed yet.