An icky squeamishness contaminated Devo's sex songs, from their earliest efforts like "Buttered Beauties" (in which Mothersbaugh imagines female secretions smeared all over him like "glossy tallow"), to the chorus "I think I missed the hole" in the debut album's "Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')". They loved pornography, whether it was Bataille's avant-garde version or Hustler's mass-market hardcore. "I wrote a song called 'Penetration in the Centerfold' about the first Hustler I ever saw", says Mothersbaugh.
Devo - Sloppy (Single version) 1977
Devo - Penetration in the Centerfold 1979
What emerged from these impulses and inputs were songs that, beneath the quirky Dada surface, were often plain misogynistic in the most conventional sense. On the debut, "Gut Feeling" segues straight into "Slap Your Mammy", while "Triumph of the Will" on the second album, Duty Now for the Future, reads like a Nietzschean justification for rape: "It was a thing I had to do/It was a message from below...It is a thing females ask for/When they convey the opposite".
Devo - Triumph of the Will 1979
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