Gerald V. Casale - Vile World
by Lux for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

When I heard that there was going to be a Devo party at Dante’s the same day they performed downtown I knew that I had to go. My best friend Eli and I stayed up all night just to catch their show in the morning, which was so worth it. They were tighter than we could have ever imagined! Afterwards I took a nap and headed to Dante’s. Much to my surprise the prolific Gerald V. Casale was quite approachable.

When we were hanging out I returned from the bar to find Gerry and some guy arguing about the upcoming election. Apparently, dude stated that he is going to vote for Bush. Gerry was livid. It was quite impressive. A few of us had to convince the guy to go away. Eventually he did.

During our interview I couldn’t help but feel as if I were soliloquizing, considering the content of his responses. Gerry Casale has got to be one the wittiest and creative individuals I have ever met! Here’s to de-evolution, Big Brother and the inevitability of martial law.

Lux: Devo just performed in Portland at the Pioneer Courthouse Square on Sunday August 01 for Nike’s Run Hit Wonder. Did you find it difficult to perform at 10am?

Gerald V. Casale: Yeah. I think it’s probably been the hardest thing we’ve ever been forced to do. It’s ridiculous to make that kind of music at ten in the morning. Then again I guess that it is also ridiculous to perform for a sea of runners all dressed alike in numbered outfits. (laughs)

Lux: You founded Devo with Mark Mothersbaugh in 1972 when you were both students at Kent State University. What inspirations lead to the birth of Devo?

GVC: In all honesty I think that Devo would have never happened had it not been for the murdering of the four students on May 04, 1970 at Kent State by the National Guard during the protest over the expansion of the Vietnam War over into Cambodia. Nixon expanded the war without an act of Congress, without asking permission. It was the beginning of a long line of Republican moves to usurp the balance of power between the judicial, executive and legislative branches of government and undercut some of the items of the constitution. What we were doing wasn’t wrong and what we were doing historically proved to be right. The students weren’t armed. All of those reports were lies. It all became clear that no student had any guns or anything and they shot students who were running away. 19 year olds shot 18 year olds with M-1 rifles, military style and got away with it. So that changed me. Until then I might have been characterized as a hippie. I was certainly kind of apolitical, although I had a growing sense of the amount of injustice in the world and a healthy disregard for illegitimate authority. That really shook me and took any kind of peace and love attitude right out of me forever. It was soon after that that I became very actively politicized and angry about the kind of Orwellian society that we lived in. It started to all formulate and coagulate so to speak in a creative way with the idea of de-evolution. De-evolution was an art movement that I started. Then Mark started doing de-evolved art. We were trying to mesh the high and the low aspects of society and culture and that transferred over to music.

What would de-evolved music sound like? It was a concept, it was an experiment so we started experimenting on what de-evolved music would sound like and it became more and more serious and we spent more and more hours on it and pretty soon that’s what you find you are doing all of the time. We took a lot of aspects of the art and the rudimentary filmmaking and we subsumed it into making music combined with video, graphics, costumes and theatrics. Basically what we were doing was performance art but there wasn’t a name like that then for what we were doing. We were unaware that we were doing performance art but that is what we were doing.

Lux: Would you consider yourself a misanthrope?

GVC: I’ve been called a misanthrope but I’m not sure why I would be. You explain to me the definition again so that I can refresh my memory of why I am a misanthrope.

Lux: A misanthrope is someone who scorns humankind.

GVC: (chuckles) Okay. Well, I don’t scorn humankind. I scorn a lot of individuals but not humankind in general. Ours was a cautionary kind of satirical, ironic criticism. We didn’t really hate people. What we hated was the worst part about human nature and those people that embodied them that have power. It is one thing to be a hillbilly on a front porch screaming racial epitaphs or whatever or saying what he is going to do, but he’s got no power. He never does anything he just blows it out of his ass, talks about it -he doesn’t do anything about it. It’s a different thing to have immense power like Paul Wolfowitz or George W. Bush does. And then disingenuously appeal to the most fear ridden, anti-intellectual aspects of human nature and then manipulate them for a private agenda, both economically and power wise.

Lux: You’ve said that Devo is a state of mind. What does this mean to you?

GVC: (laughs) Ah! We had a very acute awareness of the absurdity of being alive. We always think that we know what is going on and then history always proves that nobody ever knows what’s going on. We’re always wrong and if you knew that there are a lot of things that you wouldn’t do to begin with. Using that state of mind is more self deprecating and more ironic. There are a lot of behaviors that would be eliminated; the world would be a better place for it.

Lux: How has Devo enhanced and/or changed your personal philosophies concerning life and people in general?

GVC: I suppose because we did something creative with our ideas and our tendencies and became known as Devo. What Devo did was focus and magnify what we already intuited to be true and what we already felt in our hearts to be true. In a way it became maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy, proof of what we were saying and we found out through our fans and through travel and through interactions with the press and TV and the record companies. It all just became self-referential. We created an alternative world and then we were in it, like we were really in it! It was very funny. Unfortunately devolution is real, that’s all I can say. It turned out to be much more than a hip college joke, it turned out to be absolutely true. Now we have lived to see something far worse than those killings at Kent State and that really surprised me ‘cause I thought that would be the worst thing I ever saw and the worst I would ever feel. Now I’ve lived to see the end of democracy and the beginning of a true 1984, Brave New World, Orwellian reality. We live in a corporate futile state with group-think and one-liners, sound bites and slogans a-la cable news, like Fox 24/7 saying freedom. You know? Endless whatever. I mean there’s just one phrase after another while it crawls across the bottom of the screen and basically it’s the same as war is peace all the time. It is very funny. Fundamentalism through the corporate structure has actually taken over the world and held the world hostage.

Lux: What do you think of this lazy generation with all of its hype about millionaire marriages, reality TV, tacky pop culture propaganda and internet relationships?

GVC: All of it’s vile. All of it, again, is just proof of devolution. These people are morons. That’s period, end. Morons! Morons wanting to see reflections of themselves so mass popular TV shows and mass pop culture, all it does now is spit back images of people as they are so that they can identify and signify like, “Oh, that’s me. That could be me. In fact it is me”. At one time entertainment used to suggest what could be. In other words it took them out of their daily lives, showed them something that they couldn’t do, showed them something to think about and that’s why they got off on it. Now they don’t want that. They don’t want to see somebody that can really sing or really act or really think. They want to see reflections of their own pathetic, stupid, moronic lives spit back at them and then they make those people a hero because they’re on TV. It’s fantastic. It’s like Andy Warhol said, everybody will be a star for fifteen minutes, which has turned into more like ten years.

Lux: What would you consider to be your biggest pet peeve?

GVC: My biggest pet peeve? Wow. You know, it changes. I think it’s Hummer 2s. They immediately create homicidal feelings inside of me. (After Gerry said this I was so moved that I had to stop the interview to give him a hug!) Hummer 2s and then what really takes it into a new realm, a new dimension, is the fusion of Hummer 2s with guys with backwards baseball caps and pierced ears driving Hummer 2s. Then you have the total image of a devolved universe of the most vile character on the planet at a time when we are in a crisis as human beings, as a species on this planet, ruining the planet. The planet would be fine without us. There are these guys hasting its demise; indulging the worst, most subhuman, unvisionary tendencies of all of humankind in the reality of the Hummer 2 with the guys wearing backwards baseball caps. So it’s kind of like saying, “I’m stupid. I’m mean. I’ve got problems with the size of my penis, with my masculinity. I love getting five miles to the gallon, destroying everybody else’s view and the environment and proving that I have a big dick ‘cause I don’t think I do.”

Lux: You also direct music videos and TV commercials. What were some of your favorites to work on?

GVC: Besides all of the Devo videos when we were free to do whatever we thought of? Mark and I would sit down, discuss an idea and then I’d go direct it and we’d do it. There was nobody around that cared. There was nobody around to say no. It was fantastic. We had five things done before MTV. What happened later was that what we did as a kind of experimental art form became basically a low budget TV commercial and so everybody had something to say about it. So when I started directing for other bands there was the label, the music video person involved, the manager was involved, each of the band’s egos involved, people at MTV involved and the censors there and pretty soon your playground is so tiny. You’re in a tiny pen and there’s all of this “you can’t do that, you can’t do that, you can’t do that” until there is nothing that you can do.

Lux: You’re constantly placating egos.

GVC: Absolutely and dealing with censorship and narrow casting of what creativity is. Then the bands themselves actually became their own worst enemies ’cause then they would just want a video that looked like the last ten videos that they saw from a band with a hit record. They think that they could have a hit if they did just what that band did.

Lux: Monoculture.

GVC: Yeah. There are creative people, supposedly creative people, willingly self-censoring, willingly conforming. It was nice to work with a band like Soundgarden where they had enough power and enough millions of sales that nobody was going to tell Chris Cornell he couldn’t do something that he wanted to do. In the end there were three of four things in my music video for them MTV would normally never show, ever. But they have power at radio. Guess what? Suddenly, all these rules didn’t matter and the video went on the air as we cut it, uncensored. Because Soundgarden had the power. I also liked working with the Foo Fighters because at that point they had never made a video and they were anti-video and it was really low budget but it was fun because Dave Grohl decided okay, we’re gonna do a video but we’re kind of going to do a fucked up video. An interesting non-video video. We did a lot of good things in that video. He’ll never admit it but that video was called, “I don’t owe you anything, the song” and it was about Courtney Love and I know it was.

Lux: Tell me about your dark side.

GVC: Well, I don’t have a dark side in the sense that there’s nothing that I ever hid. There is nothing that I was ever ashamed of. I integrated, I think that everybody should do this by the way, they should integrate their dark side, whatever that fucking means, with their light side because we all as human beings have this duality in nature and that is part of being a human being. It is central to the species. It’s why we have Jungian psychology, that’s why we have Jekyl and Hyde and the people that I trust are open about their dark side and integrate it and use it creatively. You can trust any artist ‘cause they’re showing you their dark side in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody except maybe themselves ultimately. I’m afraid of the socialized person who has learned to be totally repressed and pretend that they are all good. That’s what I’m afraid of.

Lux: Okay. So, basically what you are saying is that in order to overcome duality you must create a balance. Are you familiar with Gnosticism and Tantra at all then?

GVC: Gnosticism? Yes, of course. And Tantra? Yes, of course. I mean, that was standard college fare. You would go off on those tangents and then you just realize, “You know what? Everybody is just making a big deal out of nothing.” There is no way to overcome duality. What you should do is work with it. Acknowledge it. Embrace it. That’s all. You can’t overcome it. Plus, quit making a big deal out of it. Ultimately, no matter what you say, no matter what you think you believe, all that matters is what you do. That man is known by his acts in the end. It’s like when somebody says that they care about you or says that they love you but they don’t do anything. They don’t save you when you’re trying to cross the street and a car is coming. They watch you die. All that matters in the end is what people do.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Gerald+V.+Casale+-+Vile+World/