I was going through the closet in my den the other day when I unearthed my old carrying cases of audio cassettes, buried at the bottom of a box of hats. I’ve been spending the last couple of days listening to some old tunes during my commute. There’s some good stuff in there, or at least I’ve been enjoying it; Joe Jackson, Iggy Pop, Oingo Boingo—all that hopelessly ancient stuff from the 1980s. I was particularly pleased to find my old copy of Devo Live, and have been listening to a lot of Devo while I work. My colleagues may have noticed this influence in some of the internal documents I’ve written recently.

At any rate, my quondam interest in de-evolution was rekindled by the unexpected recovery of these dusty treasures. I’ve been squandering some of my precious time on this planet by visiting such Spud strongholds as the aptly-named Devo Obsesso. In my wanderings, I found some interesting trivia, namely, the origin of the song title and lyric Jocko Homo (link goes to the iTMS). I’ve always wondered where it came from, though of course Devo has always been a quasi-surrealist venture, so I never bothered to look very hard. It turns out it was culled from Dr. B. H. Shadduck’s 1925 pamphlet Jocko-Homo Heavenbound , a refutation of the theory of evolution.

It makes for some interesting reading. It’s not in the realm of the crackpot, though —unlike the bizarre, rambling theory of cataclysm predicted in my copy of "The Coming Disaster, worse than the H-bomb: Astronomically, geologically and scientifically proven" that I have in a drawer somewhere (it’s a real howler; the author included a mimeographed copy of a letter from a man claiming to be Jesus as "proof" that "religious people" believed in his theory. Skimming through more of Shadduck’s works like Puddle to Paradise or The Toadstool Among the Tombs is entirely optional for the Devotee, but gems of quotes like "If ape-like creatures helped God evolve a man, why not enlist their help when the produce backfires?" from Gee-Haw of the Modern Jehu sure sound like the basis of De-Evolution to me. Since Devo has always been something of a "performance art" group, it’s interesting to get ahold of some of their source material, a peek into the joke inside the inside joke that Devo fans have loved for years.