The Best Stuff 4: Devo, New Traditionalists (1981)

I got my first vinyl record when I was 8, Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like An Eagle. The “space sounds” on the title track sounded cool. What I liked was the synthesizers, but the 80s hadn’t happened yet, where we started to get music that was heavily, or completely electronic.

In my freshman year of high school I discovered the first music I really, really, really liked. My friend at school Dennis lent me his Devo New Traditionalists album and I must have borrowed it (no, stole it) for several months. It had synths, vocoder, electronic plus studio drums, and stinging surf guitar. And no mushy love songs.

Their songs were about not fitting in, the confusion of relationships, genetic experimentation, world domination, and how society was going down the tubes. Their lyrics used words like "aliens" and "mutants." They were post-punk reporters standing up to The Man.

Their image was boldly different: they dressed in matching futuric outfits with plastic JFK pompadour hairdos, posed in robotic formation. In their concerts from the period they played while marching on treadmills. They were geeky, anti-cool.

This record came along at a perfect time in my life — I was just becoming a teenager and trying to figure out the world after starting high school in a new state. This music was so different than anything that was popular at the time (Pat Benatar, Joan Jett), and I realized that was OK. From here I started listening to music that nobody else had heard of or was popular, and it was OK.

I must have listened to this record a couple hundred times over the years, on multiple copies. This includes a dry spell for a couple decades during which it was not available on CD.

1. Dennis Souter’s loaned cassette (1981)
2. Low-bias TDK tape I made from friend Chrissy’s vinyl LP (1982)
3. A couple of songs found on the Greatest Hits CD (1993)
4. Used British import found in Chapel Hill used CD shop during grad school (2006)
5. Remastered CD released, the best sounding version ever (2010)

I love music and have purchased hundreds of records. If I had to take only one with me on the desert island, this is it.