Devo’s Beautiful World features Burlesque dancers, grenades, WWI German soldiers, riots, and a special cameo appearance by the KKK in a wonderful display of disdain for humanity.
Casale: “That’s a song that was written with the video in mind. The video idea preceded the song. We start off with silly imagery taken from archival film libraries of just stupid stuff – Americana pop culture stuff from the past and silly imagery of silly people, then slowly start warping it over darker and darker things – Ku Klux Klan race riots, war, suffering, atomic bomb, starvation. It transforms from one thing to another.”
The best most annoying song ever! DEVO’s Jocko Homo.
Here’s a quote about it from this great interview with Mark Mothersbaugh.
O: Is it true that Devo once opened for Sun Ra?
MM: Yeah, in 1974. He almost never came out on stage, because there were fist fights between the audience and Devo. They were doing tequila sunrise out of a big 50-gallon vat and taking… What drug were they taking? Oh, the one you inhale. Laughing gas or something. It was Halloween in Cleveland, Ohio, and somebody hired Devo as a joke. We were dressed in janitor outfits, and they were all dressed like hunchbacks and vampires, and permutations of lowest-common-denominator Halloween costumes. LCD horror. They ended up getting really pissed off at us and the music we were playing. At the time, we were a lightning rod for hostility. We would play a song like “Subhuman Woman” for seven minutes. We’d play “Jocko Homo” for 30 minutes, and we wouldn’t stop until people were actually fighting with us, trying to make us stop playing the song. We’d just keep going, “Are we not men? We are Devo!” for like 25 minutes, directed at people in an aggressive enough manner that even the most peace-lovin’ hippie wanted to throw fists. We were in a negative-energy vortex back in the mid-’70s.