Devo - Duty Now for the Future

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

Gang of Four - Solid Gold

The band's rampaging, balls-out rock side got captured on Solid Gold, which was released in early 1981. Sporadically exciting, the album's live-sounding production was more conventional than Entertainment!'s dessicated starkness.

Lyrically, Gill and King seemed to have lost their touch. The songs veered from crude, third-person typology (the protofascist caricatures of "Outside the Trains Don't Run On Time" and "He'd Send in the Army") to clumsy satire (the anti-American "Cheeseburger").

Gang of Four - Outside the Trains Don't Run On Time 1981


Gang of Four - He'd Send in the Army 1981


Gang of Four - Cheeseburger 1981

The better songs like "Paralysed" and "What We All Want" struck a note of sadness that tapped into the apprehensive mood that pervaded the start of the eighties, as the implications of the Thatcher and Reagan victories began to sink in.

Gang of Four - What We All Want 1981

The supine despondency of "Paralysed" offered an occasional glimpse of fragility in Gang of Four's music. The spoken lyric was taken by most reviewers as the lament of a man laid low by being laid off. According to Gill, who wrote and recited it, it's actually much closer to the blues in the original sense.

Gang of Four - Paralysed 1981

The Mekons' second single and debut album

The Mekons' second single for Fast Product, the indie smash "Where Were You?" was released toward the end of 1978 and quickly sold out its 27.500-copy first pressing.

The Mekons - Where Were You? 1978

The Mekons were eventually persuaded to step up to the major leagues and sign with Virgin. But the big time didn't really suit a group based around amateurish charm. All the life was sucked out of the Mekons' debut LP, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen, by its being recorded in Virgin's topflight studio, the Manor.