Last Halloween Soul Purpose played a gig at D.Coy Duck’s. I wanted the band’s costume to be Devo, but that meant I had to provide the costumes. I bailed on the idea.
Anywho, “Gut Feeling” is little more than five major chords repeated (E – G – C – A – D) as the arrangement adds instruments and intensity. There’s no verse, chorus (except that the singer starts in with “Got a gut feeling” towards the end of the song), bridge, etc. Who the hell said this could work as an interesting piece of music?
I’m sold. It’s great driving music, and it’s also fantastic for jumping around the house.
Part of the interest, for me, lies in the “fiveness” of it. Otherwise, it just kind of, like, rocks. About two minutes in, Mark Mothersbaugh finally starts singing (“Something ‘bout the way you taste makes me want to clear my throat” … NICE. And, could have been an Elvis Costello lyric from around the same era, I might add), and suddenly it’s classic Devo (can Devo be classic?). The “Slap Your Mammy” part is bonus.
It’s definitely not punk, at least not if you listen to the guitar tones (clean-ish) and ‘60s garage-band-era organ sounds. No, that puts it firmly in the New Wave camp, where punk anger becomes the more marketable “irony.” “Gut Feeling” doesn’t strike me as that ironic, though, compared with their version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (also on my 4GB iPod, and not coming off anytime soon). Okay, well maybe the lyrics are somewhat ironic in the Romantic sense of the word, as in the singer assuming a stance that is at a DISTANCE… he’s got a “gut feeling,” or rather he’s disgusted. He’s not fawning with love and goo-goo-ga-ga love stuff. The simple fact that the musical models here, as for lots of New Wave, are the mid-’60s era garage band stuff, or even the early late-’50s rock and roll pioneers, is an ironic stance against what John Covach calls “the hippie aesthetic, which dominated rock music from the late 60s until the middle of the 70s (think virtuosic instrumental solos, long-drawn out jams, glam, glitter, and androgyny, singer-songwriter-ish introspection, and so on…). Elvis Costello dressed up like Buddy Holly is perhaps the best visual expression of what I’m talking about…
Enough talk. You should be jumping around by now.
Album info: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978)
following that line of thought: what of Devo’s admitted, self-characterization as not men, but rather, the undefined, loosely assumed machine-like devo (especially given the ablum from which this song springs) and the group’s coincidence with the personal computer revolution of the late 1970s/early 1980s. Puts an interesting spin of/wonderful contextual confusion of the idea of “personal” distance, no? And quite agreed about that taste lyric – - it’s fantastic.
Excellent point, Stew. By the way: loved your drumming on “Spirits in the Material World.”