Performing the Avant-Garde Groove:
Devo and the Whiteness of the New Wave

By Theo Cateforis

All it took was one week in New York City in the fall of 1978 to transform Devo from relative obscurity into a popular music cause célèbre, and a band that would come to symbolize the nascent American new wave rock movement as a form of avant-garde entertainment. The excitement centered around the group's October 14 guest musical slot on Saturday Night Live, one of the music industry's most coveted proving grounds for up-and-coming bands. Devo had already generated a considerable buzz over the past year and a half, having received favorable industry exposure via numerous important shows at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City in New York and the Starwood and Whisky-a-Go-Go in Los Angeles. They had even been featured on the cover of one of England's leading weekly music magazines, Melody Maker. But for the most part the group from Akron, Ohio, was still essentially an underground phenomenon, relegated in its own country to features in rock fanzine publications like Search & Destroy, New York Rocker, and Trouser Press. For the majority of the national television audience watching SNL that night, it was their first glimpse of Devo's brand of bizarre conceptual rock music.