As I sit down opposite the gray-haired man in a black shirt and glasses, someone comes to clear the clutter off the table — a stick-thin, retro-futuristic guitar that has been rigged for its strings to explode at the climax of a solo. His flame-haired partner takes a seat; he's wearing a full suit — blue shirt and silver jacket and trousers — and is unflinching in Chiba's stifling summer heat. Are these not men? They are Devo.
Bursting out of Akron, Ohio in the late 1970s, Devo are the archetypal new-wave band. Touting an unmistakable artistic flair and a philosophy that society is not evolving but regressing, or devolving, the band pushed the boundaries of synth pop, writing avant-garde songs that flirted with strange time signatures and brazen sloganeering. It was more listenable than The Residents; more willfully obscure than The B-52's; more organic than Kraftwerk.
"If you listen to everything that happened at the same time we were out, the music didn't really fit in with everything else," says Mark Mothersbaugh, the gray-haired one. "You had all these different groups of bands that all related to each other, and Devo's just kind of, 'Well, there's nobody else in their category.' "