Devo Album: “Freedom of Choice”

As with my review of the remastered Q. Are We Not Men? We. Are Devo!, it is rather ironic that the last of Devo's albums to be remastered for CD are their two most iconic albums: the grand statement of De-evolution with Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are DEVO! and the commercial breakthrough, Freedom of Choice. Nearly fifteen years after Henry Rollins first began releasing the remasters of the remainder of Devo's WB catalogue on his Infinite Zero label, WB have finally gotten around around to remastering these groundbreaking albums.

Hallelujah, Freedom Of Choice has been remastered for CD. You can actually hear bass on the CD of this reissue and the remastering reveals so much more detail and clarity. Instrumentation sounds much more open and not the muddy mess evident on the previous CD release of this abum. It's as if a wet blanket has been lifted off your speakers. However, as with Q?A!, the remastering process has not entirely corrected everything and has even introduced a few glitches of its own.

Again, in going back to the "original analog recording tapes", all of the artifacts of 30 years of analog tape storage have once again come to the fore. There are numerous tape print through (ghosting) artifacts that detract from the overall enjoyment of this album. The worst examples of these is the end of Girl U Want where there is a persistent echo of "She's just a girl, she's just a girl" as well as a pre-echo of the bass intro to It's Not Right. Ditto between Mr. B's Ballroom and Planet Earth where there is a post echo on the former and a pre-echo on the latter. None of these artifacts were on any previous vinyl or CD release of this album. Hello remastering engineer, did you actually listen to this before signing it off? It's Not Right. Every one of these glitches should have been removed during the remastering process.

As for Deluxe, I don't think so. Maybe WB should've passed this one over to Rhino as well for the Deluxe treatment. Tacking the Dev-O Live EP onto the end of the album as Deluxe bonus material is plain lazy. For a format that can hold up to 80 minutes of content, this "Deluxe" disc still clocks in at just over 50 minutes. Where is the bonus material/disc of B-sides, demos and other oddities? Where is Turn Around (you know, the song covered by Nirvana) and the remix of Snowball that were also recorded during these album sessions? Where are the demos recorded during the FOC writing process that didn't appear on the Rhino Handmade Recombo DNA set: Red Shark (that became It's Not Right), Ton O' Luv, Freedom Of Choice and Don't You Know? What about Fountain of Filth that was recorded numerous times during the demo sessions? Or how about a DVD with the live TV appearances on Fridays or Don Kirshner's Rock Concert? And not a liner note in sight. As with Q?A!, this reissue offered a golden opportunity to release a Deluxe version of this iconic album by an iconic band that has been lost.

Devo truly were Pioneers That Got Scalped and now us long denied fans have been scalped as well. Hopefully the forthcoming Devo reissues from WB will have a bit more effort put into them in terms of both remastering of the audio and bonus materials.

I'm giving this five stars for simply because of the iconic nature of this album. If I could break it down between rating the audio quality, the bonus materials and the remastering the individual ratings for these categories would be a lot less.

The only version I had ever heard of this album was the original CD release from the late 80's. I never owned the vinyl on this one. Well, I can tell you, if you have that old CD release, this new mastering is definitely worth the price. It's almost like hearing a completely different mix. Incredible improvement compared to the original CD release. And as a nice bonus for those of us that have CD players with HDCD decoding, the CD is encoded with HDCD (though this is not indicated anywhere on the packaging). Frankly, this was never one of my favorite DEVO albums, but I think now it was because the CD sounded so dull and lifeless, almost like I had cotton stuffed in my ears. With the way the new mastering sounds, this just might become my favorite DEVO album. One quibble: I wish they had included "Turn Around", which was the B-side on the "Whip It" 45 single.

Something you'll know if you're in the know about Devo. The spudboys from Akron, O-hi-o were music's inside joke for their useable shelf life: A musical act, predicated on the premise of de-evolution, which surely and steadily devolves into a corporate computer and synth outfit.

I can't tell you how many times I heard that "Devo sold out!" Well, the joke's on you, because that is what Devo was all about: Selling out! Why do you think they went to great lengths to create the cheesy Rod Rooter and insert him in their videos as a stand-in for the hack producers who were forced upon them?

Devo was all about packaging and marketing. Is it any wonder that twenty years later, Target uses "Beautiful World" to sell consumer America on their idea of a beautiful world, a cold and grinch-like place in which Salvation Army bellringers are sent back to their slums, out of sight of Target's newly upscale clientele?

But, I digress.

Devo started dropping little "Paul Is Dead" style hints about their parodies of corporate music in their second album, "Duty Now for the Future," which indeed begins with the highly official and authoritarian "Devo Corporate Anthem." Spreading their (Mr.) DNA by means of the Smart Patrol, Devo infected America's ears with the seminal fluid of a one-size-fits-all prefabricated world. Flying beneath the radar, it was a Triumph of the Will on their part.

Which brings us at long last to this album, whose signature marketing gimmick was the vacu-plastic Energy Dome (or, red flower pots, to the uninitiated); an Energy Dome hat pin was available to students on a budget, or fair-weather spuds. Again, my punker friends told me "Devo is selling out!" They entirely missed the send-up of tie-in marketing the pop music had foisted on them for generations. Devo's yellow suits (official nomenclature: Anti-Human-Element suits), Duty Now atomic symbol student-T's, plastic pompadours, maxi speak-no-evil-turtlenecks, spudring collars and Chinese-American friendship pins were all Devo's antisceptic answers to the Monkees' lunchbox, Partridge Family shopping bags, the Jackson-5ive cartoons and Beatles coloring books.

"Freedom of Choice" is Devo's hallmark of artistic fame and corporate shame. "Use Your Freedom of Choice," they wail -- whilst narrowing your freedom of choice to five identically uniformed petrochemical rocker nerds. "Whip It!" About the joys of self devo-tion, sadomasochism or (to quote Mark Mothersbaugh, in a later interview) simply "a self-help song?" YOU make the choice!

This album's chock full of eminently danceable songs in 4/4 time: Aside from the aforementioned, "Girl U Want," "Ton O' Luv," "Gates of Steel" and "That's Pep" are the least devolved.

"Planet Earth" is code for Devo's observation that we really don't have freedom of choice, but can be satisfied with the illusion of same. It looks forward to "Beautiful World" on their next vinyl offering.

Devo-ted spuds will make note that the contemporaneous tune "Turnaround" is not on this or any other album version; It was only available as the flip side to the "Whip It" 45 rpm.

But, thanks to corporate music mavens such as Rod Rooter of Big Entertainment, you can't get 45's anymore. Just compact discs. And, government-controlled MP-3s.

Now *that's* what I call Freedom of Choice!

I was so into DEVO that, at my college graduation, I had an energy dome to put on my head after I received my diploma. I was completely taken in by how skillfully the band deconstructed the typical rock and roll preconceptions and virtually invented a style. This is, along with "Q: Are We Not Men," the Devo album that integrates the band's theories on De-evolution most completely to the music. Since I can't give it 4 1/2 stars, I am perfectly comfortable giving it five!

"Freedom Of Choice" was where DEVO's world-view was overtaken by a case of pop-smarts. By 1980, all sorts of new-wave trademark-sounding cheap synth had become both widely available and more reliable, so the sound of the keyboards and guitars could mesh into a recordable (and more controlled) whole. DEVO's synths on "F.O.C." had moved almost entirely to the fore, and there was an obvious attempt at more disciplined song writing. It shows most obviously on "Girl You Want" and "Gates Of Steel." The very un-devoish longing in "Girl You Want" was universal enough to have found its way into the set lists of artists ranging from Soundgarden to Robert Palmer. The title track mocks how submissive we are when it comes to culture/consumer manipulation, while "Whip It" strings together a catalog of catch phrases and self-help mantras into a cracking (pun intended) three minute anthem. On the side of human conditions, "Mr. B's Ballroom" cocks its DEVO-eyes at the kind of hole-in-the-wall establishment where best friends drink and start fights before crashing through the plate glass door. (Likely while "Whip It" is playing on the jukebox.)

Just as important, this album (and its videos) is probably how most people measure their knowledge of DEVO by. "Whip It" became the kind of song that college new-wave parties did the pogo to, and corporate rallies would chant along with as a morale enhancer. By making synthesizer rock safe for frat boys, "Freedom Of Choice" is easily the second of DEVO's crowning albums.

Oh, I know Devo had a big ol' hit on here with "Whip It," but there's eleven more tracks! "Gir U Want" is one of the world's most perfect rock songs, "Freedom Of Choice" is a bona-fide anthem, and "Snowball" is silmultaneously uplifting and sad. They didn't just dress funny, they were great songwriters, too.