Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} 's Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy Evie Nagy, Devo. Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future , and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip. Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devo's last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts from the band and musical analysis set against an examination of new wave's emergence, the first-ever authorized book about Devo (with a foreword by Portlandia's Fred Armisen) explores the group's peak of success, when their hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, and plenty of misunderstandings. "Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence–it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number," says Casale. "It's where everything changes." “Evie Nagy's 33 1/3 book on Devo's Freedom of Choice is fantastic, nerdy, swift and meticulous, and the book you have been waiting for if you even like Devo a little bit.” – Jessica Hopper, Senior Editor, Pitchfork. “. a solid look back at the point where everything changed for Devo . Nagy gets Devo's mix of nerdishness, humour, and serious political intent … bringing together new quotes from Devo members, others involved with the album, people from Devo's circle over the years, as well as bits from contemporary articles to tell a story that's well worth reading for anyone interested alternative music or 1980s pop culture.” – TheFifteenth. “Nagy's look at Devo offers some great anecdotes for the spuds out there. There are coked-out stories about the band in the studio and on the road, as well as a look at how the oddball aesthetic of Devo left its fingerprints on nerd culture over the last few decades, maybe even initiating the whole geek chic thing.” – Hubert Vigilla, Ruby Hornet. “Get straight! Go forward! There's no Hazmat jacket required to whip through Freedom of Choice, which motors through Devo's rich history with all the relentless precision and curveball flourishes of their greatest works, and-best of all-vividly renders the very human souls behind the automaton anthems that devolutionized an era."” – Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. “Spuds will love the nostalgia and the insiders' information in Devo's Freedom of Choice … Non-spuds who think of Devo as a one-hit wonder will be surprised to read of Devo's impact and musical influence. Spuds and non-spuds alike will want to dust off their old LPs or cassettes, or pull up some songs on YouTube, and relive the early days of Devo, a great band ahead of its time.” – Reading Glutton. Search AbeBooks. We're sorry; the page you requested could not be found. AbeBooks offers millions of new, used, rare and out-of-print books, as well as cheap textbooks from thousands of booksellers around the world. 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Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip. Before an artistic and commercial decline that . Read More. Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future , and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip. Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devo's last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet- proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts from the band and musical analysis set against an examination of new wave's emergence, the first-ever authorized book about Devo (with a foreword by Portlandia's Fred Armisen) explores the group's peak of success, when their hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, and plenty of misunderstandings. Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence-it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number, says Casale. It's where everything changes. Read Less. All Copies ( 17 ) Softcover ( 17 ) Choose Edition ( 1 ) Book Details Seller Sort. 2015, Bloomsbury Academic. Columbia, MD, USA. Edition: 2015, Bloomsbury Academic Trade paperback, Good Details: ISBN: 1623563445 ISBN-13: 9781623563448 Pages: 184 Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic Published: 2015 Language: English Alibris ID: 16687745015 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: €3,60. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Good. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 184 p. Contains: Illustrations. 33 1/3. May show signs of wear, highlighting, writing, and previous use. This item may be a former library book with typical markings. No guarantee on products that contain supplements Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. Twenty-five year bookseller with shipments to over fifty million happy customers. ► Contact This Seller. 2015, Bloomsbury Academic. Edition: 2015, Bloomsbury Academic Trade paperback, Good Details: ISBN: 1623563445 ISBN-13: 9781623563448 Pages: 184 Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic Published: 2015 Language: English Alibris ID: 16669869431 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: €3,60 Trackable Expedited: €7,20. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: Good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972. Used books may not include companion materials, some shelf wear, may contain highlighting/notes, and may not include cd-rom or access codes. Customer service is our top priority! ► Contact This Seller. 2015, Bloomsbury Academic. Columbia, MD, USA. Edition: 2015, Bloomsbury Academic Trade paperback, New Available Copies: 3 Details: ISBN: 1623563445 ISBN-13: 9781623563448 Pages: 184 Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic Published: 2015 Language: English Alibris ID: 16590569971 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: €3,60. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 184 p. Contains: Illustrations. 33 1/3. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers. ► Contact This Seller. 2015, Bloomsbury Academic. Glendale Heights, IL, USA. Edition: 2015, Bloomsbury Academic Trade paperback, New Available Copies: 10 Details: ISBN: 1623563445 ISBN-13: 9781623563448 Pages: 184 Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic Published: 7/16/2015 12: 00: 00 AM Language: English Alibris ID: 16666908046 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: €3,60. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Seller's Description: New Book. Shipped from UK in 4 to 14 days. Established seller since 2000. Please note we cannot offer an expedited shipping service from the UK. ► Contact This Seller. 2015, Bloomsbury Academic. Edition: 2015, Bloomsbury Academic Trade paperback, New Available Copies: 10 Details: ISBN: 1623563445 ISBN-13: 9781623563448 Pages: 184 Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic Published: 2015 Language: English Alibris ID: 16645827814 Shipping Options: Standard Shipping: €3,60. Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination. Everything we thought we knew about Devo's "Whip It" was wrong. The unexpected message of New Wave's defining anthem. By Evie Nagy. Published September 16, 2017 5:30PM (EDT) Shares. Excerpted from "Devo's Freedom of Choice" by Evie Nagy (Bloomsbury, 2015). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing. Go forward, move ahead, try to detect it, it’s not too late. Let’s get one thing clear about Devo’s biggest hit of all time: “Whip It” is not a song about masturbation, or S&M. At least that’s the story that everyone involved is sticking to, and it seems unlikely that a band who in 1974 had recorded a demo with the lyrics “I need a chick to suck my dick” (later released on Hardcore Devo: Volume 2) would demur on this point. According to Jerry, who wrote the lyrics, “Whip It” is a tongue-in-cheek pep talk satirizing hollow American optimism. “I had been reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow , and he had these limericks and poems in there that really made me laugh, where he was making fun of all the American, capitalist, can-do clichés—Horatio Alger—‘there’s nobody else like you,’ ‘you’re number one,’ ‘you can do it.’ And I was just trying my hand at it.” While it would certainly be consistent with Devo’s methods to include a knowing double entendre, they are adamantly ambivalent about the common misunderstanding, which both goosed the song’s popularity and made it ever more clear that the masses would never quite get what the band were trying to do. “We wrote it as a ‘you can do it, Dale Carnegie’ pep talk for President Carter,” says Mark. “We were afraid that Republicans were going to get in there [in 1980], and they sounded very nasty at the time. They were running this guy, Ronald Reagan, that seemed like a total—he seemed like he didn’t even have a brain. We were like, ‘How could that be our president? That’s impossible, that they choose him to run for president.’ So we were writing this music that was like, ‘You can do it, Mr. President.’ And then, of course, we were doing lots of interviews back then, and we’d have to get up at seven so we could go be on a morning talk show while people are driving to work. And we’d be sitting in the other room waiting to go in and talk to the disc jockey, and he’d be on the air, going, ‘You know, I whipped it just the other day, haw haw haw haw,’ and we’re like, ‘What an asshole.’ We felt very misunderstood. And then it just gave us more reasons to be crabby.” But when it came time to make the song’s now-legendary music video, Devo ran with the S&M theme to absurd extremes. If you know nothing else about Devo, you know “Whip It,” the band’s only gold-certified single, which reached No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a defining anthem of new wave’s rise. The song’s drumbeat and primary guitar and keyboard lines are each so distinctive that they could likely be identified, even in isolation, by anyone who’d heard the song a few times. That each part stands so well on its own is probably because Jerry says he assembled “Whip It” from two separate sketches—the famous five-note climb and the slower, three-note descent—that Mark brought to the group on cassette tape from his at-home writing sessions. “I asked him when he did that ‘doon-doon-doon-doom-dong’ riff, and he goes ‘well, I’ve had that for about six months,’” says Jerry. “I said ‘Really?’ and he goes ‘yeah, it’s just “Oh, Pretty Woman” cut in half.’” Mark had been living with his brother at the house of Bob’s girlfriend’s mother, who rented him a small bedroom for sleeping while not on tour and writing music. “I had been listening to Roy Orbison, and I really liked the song ‘Oh, Pretty Woman,’” says Mark. “And then I started thinking about how you take things apart, and reductive synthesis, so I just took part of the riff, and I wrote another ending. I just took some basic, generic thing and put an ending on it that was a different sound and from a different place.” The motorik drumbeat grew out of another collaboration, with Captain Beefheart’s drummer Robert Williams, who shared a house not far from Mark with Go-Go’s drummer Gina Schock. “I didn’t really have a good set of drum loops or drum machines or anything, so what I used to do is lug my tape recorder with me over to my friend Robert Williams’s house,” says Mark. “The Go-Go’s would rehearse there. Captain Beefheart would rehearse there. I would take my tape recorder and play a drum beat, and get Robert to play it for, like, four minutes on a tape so I could write music to it. And so, he was the first person who played the ‘Whip It’ drum beat, and he played it without any music.” Alan Myers then added fills and made the quick, relentless rhythm his own; it’s one of the best examples of Alan’s ability to be, as Jerry called him after his death in 2013, a “human metronome and then some.” The song absolutely relies on the beat’s consistency and drive. For the all-important whipping sounds, Devo and Robert Margouleff used an EML ElectroComp 500 , Neumann KM 84 and U 87 condenser mics, and a lot of space. “There was a long hallway at The Record Plant that was actually outdoors between two buildings, but only about three and a half feet wide,” says Margouleff. “We used that hallway to go from Studio A to Studio B and then back into the back of the building. It was very reverberant, and that’s where we recorded that whip crack.” There’s also a whipping-back-and-forth quality to the vocals, which Mark and Jerry decided to trade off. “It was a call and response,” says Jerry. “Kind of like white boys rapping.” Unlike artists who grow to hate their biggest hit (see Robert Plant vs. “Stairway To Heaven”), Devo don’t begrudge “Whip It” its iconic status, though they would have liked more of their songs to achieve it. “I’m glad it was ‘Whip It,’ because it’s certainly twisted and original,” says Jerry. “Those are the hallmarks of Devo, that you expect something different or witty or twisted, a little off. It has all that. And it came from a good place; it came from a pure, creative, open collaboration, and that’s to me when all the best stuff comes.” ISBN 13: 9781623563448. Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future , and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade's high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980's Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his "alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band" both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip. Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devo's last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts from the band and musical analysis set against an examination of new wave's emergence, the first-ever authorized book about Devo (with a foreword by Portlandia's Fred Armisen) explores the group's peak of success, when their hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, and plenty of misunderstandings. " Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence–it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number," says Casale. "It's where everything changes." "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Evie Nagy is an arts and business journalist who has been a staff editor and writer at Rolling Stone , Billboard and Fast Company . She lives in Oakland, CA. “Evie Nagy's 33 1/3 book on Devo's Freedom of Choice is fantastic, nerdy, swift and meticulous, and the book you have been waiting for if you even like Devo a little bit.” ― Jessica Hopper, Senior Editor, Pitchfork. “Nagy’s little book helps us stay in a special moment in new-wave rock history.” ―Ed Komara, Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal. “Evie Nagy's book on Freedom of Choice is a solid look back at the point where everything changed for Devo. As 33 1/3 books go, this is one of the more straightforward ones, built on research and interviews with a lot of the key players, looking at the album's creation and its place in Devo's career, It's a good read, and Nagy gets Devo's mix of nerdishness, humour, and serious political intent . Nagy does a solid job bringing together new quotes from Devo members, others involved with the album, other people from Devo's circle over the years, and other musicians as well as bits from contemporary articles to tell a story that's well worth reading for anyone interested alternative music or 1980s pop culture.” ― TheFifteenth. “Get straight! Go forward! There's no Hazmat jacket required to whip through Freedom of Choice , which motors through Devo's rich history with all the relentless precision and curveball flourishes of their greatest works, and-best of all-vividly renders the very human souls behind the automaton anthems that devolutionized an era.” ―Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. “Nagy's look at Devo offers some great anecdotes for the spuds out there. There are coked-out stories about the band in the studio and on the road, as well as a look at how the oddball aesthetic of Devo left its fingerprints on nerd culture over the last few decades, maybe even initiating the whole geek chic thing.” ―Hubert Vigilla, Ruby Hornet. “Nagy has conducted interviews with the remaining Devo members, has quoted extensively from interviews and has told in detail the history of the album including the elaborate studio sessions with producer Robert Margouleff . This is compulsory reading for fans.” – HHV-Mag. “Spuds will love the nostalgia and the insiders' information in Devo's Freedom of Choice . Non-spuds who think of Devo as a one-hit wonder will be surprised to read of Devo's impact and musical influence. Spuds and non-spuds alike will want to dust off their old LPs or cassettes, or pull up some songs on YouTube, and relive the early days of Devo, a great band ahead of its time.” - Reading Glutton.