Digital Man or Jocko Homo: Rush, Devo, and competing visions of the technofuture

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the lyrics of Rush and Devo – and in the case of Devo, their embodied performance – during their key overlapping creative periods from the late-1970s to the mid-1980s. Both imagined technology becoming a greater force – and threat – for humanity, although Rush championed constant opposition to and despair at the alienation of humanity while Devo reveled in an ambiguous postmodern fashion about humanity’s devolved cyborg future. Several decades of hindsight suggest that Rush represented the futile struggle of the (modern) Last Human whereas Devo more accurately captured the contemporary capitulation to the Post Human.