This is definitely my favorite Devo song. Admittedly, I haven't been a true Devo fan for very long, only since I first saw them live at Cruel World in 2022. Seeing all those old guys on stage looking like the coolest fuckin' guys I've ever seen in my life, well, it changed my life. I started devouring every Devo album, even the bad ones. I saw them live again at Darker Waves 2023, and then later that year in November for one of their "farewell tour" shows. Both those last performances I was flying solo, a scrawny old maniac dancing alone amidst a sea of older people who seemed to have forgotten that Devo is dance music.

Not only is the music for this song quite possibly the strongest ear worm Devo ever synthesized, but the lyrics are just glorious. They are reportedly based on a series of threatening letters sent to a game show host by someone calling themselves Cowboy Kim, which you can view at that link.

That said, the best part of the lyrics don't seem to come from those letters, the chorus: "I'm a man with a mission, a boy with a gun. I got a picture in my pocket of the lucky one, who doesn't know I'm a big mess." I don't think it's a coincidence this song is on the same album with "I Desire", with its lyrics from a poem by John Hinkley, Jr., and "Peek-a-boo", arguably the scariest DEVO song. I think we could call Oh No It's Devo "the stalker album". Definite shades of Peter Gabriel's "Family Snapshot" to be found here.

This is another DEVO cover, of the most excellent song "Pity You", which had to be covered under a different song name for record label related legal reasons. "Pity You" is right up there in the greatest DEVO songs pantheon, at least my pantheon, and this cover might actually improve it in several ways–which is probably easy because it's all five members of DEVO playing the song. This is like "DEVO with Toni Basil", and it fucking rules so hard.

It's also accompanied by this fever dream of a music video that is probably one of my most favorite archival pieces of 80's film I've ever seen. Everything about this is so excellent, from beginning to end, just insane. To be paired with such a great song, ugh, it's not fair.

What's also not fair, for Toni Basil, is that she only did four DEVO songs. (The other two on this album are "Be Stiff" and "Space Girls", both very good as well; later there's the DEVO song "The Only One" with Basil fronting, too.) Gerald Casale semi-co-produced her self-titled album later and, sadly, it's no good (aside from Mickey, of course); and the non-DEVO songs on this album aren't any good either. Sorry, Toni, if you're reading this, I desperately wanted to like your albums, but they're just not for me. Those three DEVO songs, good lord, it's actually proof I don't live in a simulation crafted just for me, that there isn't a full album or two of Toni Basil fronted DEVO songs.

Yeah, I’m just going to hit you with another Gates of Steel cover. This one is by sludge metal band Eyehategod. I really, really like this cover a lot.

There’s someone on YouTube who says they don’t like the half-time parts and that person is unbelievably wrong. The half-time parts destabilize the song in the best way. One second you’re grooving along and then suddenly you’re slowly head-banging; it’s like hitting the softest brick wall. I just love it. It feels so weird, and genuinely brings something new to the table, something all the other covers I’ve heard so far do not.

Apple Music came out with an AI-assisted prompt-based playlist creator, so I put in the first thing that came to my mind, "DEVO influenced metal," which I thought sounded kind of absurd. But little did I know, it made perfect sense. One of two genuinely good covers in the playlist (which only had 3 songs total, Apple Music AI giving it the ol' college try, I see) was this cover of Gates of Steel, by Surgical Meth Machine, which I did not know until this very moment is a Al Jourgensen side project, though this song is played at Ministry shows, so how much of a side project is this really, but whatever. I mean, okay, being fair, being as fair as I can be, this sounds like more like an Andrew W.K. song than a Ministry song.

While I was hunting this song down again, I was surprised to see five different covers of Gates of Steel, most of them metal / hard rock bands, but there's a really bitchin' ska version by Skankin' Pickle. I guess this shouldn't be a surprise, as Gates of Steel is right up there in the holy pantheon of great DEVO songs, if not all the way up at the very tippy top of the energy dome. What a great song. It doesn't matter how it's covered, those chords are emotive no matter what they sound like.