Devo, a documentary on the punk/new-wave band of that name, has dropped on Netflix. It’s an earnest, archive clip-packed attempt to convince you this odd band amounted to more than their one hit, 1980s “Whip It.” The band coalesced in the 1970s in Akron, Ohio, “the rubber capital of the world,” under founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, who met at Kent State University in the foment of the Vietnam War protests and the killing on campus of four students by the National Guard in 1970.

As a dorky kid and Devo fan in the Reagan years, I missed out on their political and philosophical importance, or perhaps self-importance. I liked the “energy dome” hats and the funny, slightly disturbing lyrics like “Peekaboo!/I know what you do/‘Cause I do it too.” I was watching when the band’s nerd cred was immortalized in a 1982 appearance on the teen sitcom Square Pegs as punk character Johnny Slash’s “ninth-favorite band.”

Devo didn’t save the world from conformity and “de-evolution,” but in their heyday (the five studio albums released between 1978-1982) they provided the world dozens of perversely catchy songs: the herky-jerky beat of the Stones cover “Satisfaction” from their first album, synthesizer-funk like “Whip It” from their excellent 1980 album Freedom of Choice; the juicy synth-pop of their funniest record, Oh No, It’s Devo! whose cover doubled as a picture stand.

By 1976, Devo had coalesced into their popular configuration: Mark Mothersbaugh, vocals and keyboards, Mark’s brother, Bob (aka Bob 1) on lead guitar, Gerald Casale, bass player and band theoretician, Gerald’s brother Bob (aka Bob 2) on guitar and keyboards, and Alan Myers on drums. The group’s groundbreaking videos were directed by Casale, who noted, “We were a video entity before we were a working band.” The band got local gigs by saying they could play Bad Company covers (Mothersbaugh mentions the “headache solo” that drove off unfortunate attendees of Devo’s early shows), but the band began breaking into public view when a short they filmed won local awards.

Video recording pioneers, the band was made for this kind of retrospective, though the documentary’s robust clip archive may contain little that’s revelatory to hard-core DEVOtees. Particularly amusing are Devo’s TV appearances. Watching the band interacting with puzzled icons of normality like Dick Clark and Merv Griffin, one can feel the cringe through the decades.

Devo’s main theme is the frustration of having everyone misunderstand their concept of “de-evolution,” of evolution being thrown into reverse after the optimism of the 1960s, a trope Devo’s songs underlined with references to monkeys and apes. In a review of Devo, Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press called the band “perhaps the most misunderstood band on the face of the planet.” Casale told Kennedy, “Nobody wanted to hear us talking about the duality of human nature and the dangers of groupthink and the atrophication of people being able to think logically and think critically.” Yikes, just play “Whip It” again!

There’s a hidden theme of hostility to burger chains. Mothersbaugh claimed ironic inspiration from a 1974 TV commercial for Burger King that set the “Have it Your Way” jingle to Pachelbel’s Canon in D: “They took one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, and turned it into an ad to sell hamburgers.” Casale goes off on Carl’s Jr. burger chain as “a staunch fundamentalist right-wing anti-choice organization.” Ironically, the band’s main icon is the humble potato, the hamburger’s best friend. In fairness, the two chief members, Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale, look trim and healthy in their mid-70s.

With their Warner Brothers contract in the balance after the first single off Freedom of Choice stiffed, the second release, “Whip It,” made the Top 20, and the album went platinum (one million copies sold). But the joke was on fans, because the “Whip It” video — a western-themed oddity where a black-clad, energy-domed Mothersbaugh whips a woman’s clothes off while cowboy-hat clad beer-drinkers cheer him on, was actually mocking then-President Ronald Reagan and his cowboy conservatism. Rolling Stone magazine went further, saying it exemplified “Ronald Reagan’s fascist cowboy persona.” Casale admitted it was “a cheap, exploitative video,” saying, “It’s offensive. It’s devolved. And everybody loved it.” One thing Devo excels at is having it both ways.

Casale sums up the band’s philosophy thusly: “We were seeing a world that was the antithesis of the idealized, promised future ginned up in the ’50s and ’60s. What we saw was regression.” Indeed, the group often betrayed their sour feelings toward America and the people in it. While Casale likens his fellow Americans to cogs in a machine, he seems to exempt Devo from the general condemnation. The repetitive, barely hidden disdain for fat Americans in polyester gets tiresome over the documentary’s 90-minute run time.

Despite Casale’s bloviations, the most offensive thing in Devo may be Mothersbaugh sneering at rocker Bob Seger for providing no “content.” Never mind that Seger songs “Still the Same” and “Mainstreet” may hang around the public consciousness longer than “Whip It.” Still, Mothersbaugh comes off more humorous and ironic than Casale, still an angry young man, saying of the group’s 1981 album New Traditionalists, “We need new traditions, not this Reagan crap.”

Marxist-adjacent rock critic Christgau had them pegged in a 1981 concert review: “they purvey a sour satire in which audience is sometimes indistinguishable from target.”

Striving to make them seem significant, the documentary skimps on Devo’s gentler, self-deprecating side interviews with humorous alternate uses for the “energy domes” (good for feeding the dog, not so much for baking cakes).

Perhaps tactically, Devo barely mentions, near the end, Mark Mothersbaugh’s vastly successful and presumably quite lucrative capitalist career as a soundtrack composer. The documentary closes with “Beautiful World,” their best song, where the band’s ironic brand of satire comes together under a compelling melody.

And if Devo failed to translate their political program into being, let the record show they smuggled an impressive amount of their oddball philosophy into tunes like “Jocko Homo,” “Gates of Steel,” and “Beautiful World.” As Christgau wrote in a positive review of Freedom of Choice: “I insulted them every chance I got back when your roommate still thought they might be Important. But now that that’s taken care of itself we can all afford to giggle.” De-evolution: It comes for all.

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