Devo
EZ Listening Muzak (Box Set)

THE REVIEW

You might say: Oh, no! It's Muzak!

First released in 1987 and reissued a couple of months ago with a stunning new graphic design, an extra track, gadgets, and bells and whistles, EZ listening Muzak is a best of by Devo, published when the American band featuring Casale, Mothersbaugh & Co. had essentially already fired their best shots and was surrendering helplessly to the generational shift of the future decades, in which they would serve as an inspiration to pseudo-indie bands scoring a 7.1 on Pitchfork.

Of course, keeping up with one of the best debut albums of all time (Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!), produced by that genius of a friend of mine, Brian Eno, was no easy feat.

It's never easy to impose even a small avant-garde and maintain it over time. A mission that proved impossible for them, for Television, for Suicide, and all the CBGB gang, including the Talking Heads, who devoured the Eighties, only to break up at the dawn of the Nineties, avoiding a tragic series of flop records. For Devo, the flops came quite early, but not before making Brian Eno say that the cover of "Satisfaction" on their debut album remains one of his most successful productions. After revolutionizing the late Seventies, after being punk, new wave, forerunners of videomusic, unwitting MTV champions, actors, dancers, artists, merchandising enthusiasts, authors of Mongoloid, Jocko Homo, after explaining to us that we are all a bit Devo (amid a devolution that manifests today in Facebook hoaxes and functional illiteracy), and after throwing all this fuel on the fire until the early Eighties, if you manage to add more, you're the band of the century.

And for Devo, trapped within their image, changes in perspective and aesthetic revolutions were not allowed. And maybe they didn't care that much. It might have been with the cry of "We are all Devo!" that when the charts and radio play sang bye bye, they decided to release a collection of their tracks arranged in a Muzak style, which is that jazzy music produced under the Muzak label: music broadcast in public places as "background music."

A phrase (and sounds) that the devotees of musique d'ameublement, led by John Cage, couldn't stand too much. Background music cannot be a horizontal sequence of xylophones following the rhetorical dictates of musical logos. Background music shouldn't "speak," because speech demands attention and, consequently, generates distraction. And background music cannot distract. Cage himself is said to have asked Muzak to exclusively release his historic 4' 33": that [TACET], yes, was background music. But we'll talk about that another time. With their nerve-racking "Muzak" versions of their hits, Devo seemed to want to find the fitting soundtrack to narrate the now unstoppable devolutionary process.

That devolution, affecting a society ready to, soon and with increasing possibility and insistence, reveal its skewed confirmation biases, surrendering to the horizontal mercy of global dumbing down made of clickbaiting and gullibility. A final stroke of genius (avant-garde and philosophical) before resigning to a nostalgic career made up of small concerts and appearances at the most unlikely festivals. Many ask me if there are any true heirs to Devo. I always reply that the only worthy heir of Devo is the sound of the 56k modem.