DEVO Frontman Mark Mothersbaugh on 1970s Pop Band Predicting Today’s Politics: “It’s Gone Really Dark Again”

It’s déjà vu all over again for DEVO frontman and veteran composer Mark Mothersbaugh, who co-founded the iconic 1970s and 1980s rock band during its own dark political era.

“It’s gone really dark again. We’re in a really dark place now, where we have greed and racism not hiding at all. They’re proud and displaying themselves, and it’s shocking that it could be this strong,” Mothersbaugh tells The Hollywood Reporter from the Vancouver Film Festival.

Mothersbaugh and his fellow DEVO co-founders, including Gerald “Jerry” Casale, formed the band in the wake of the May 4, 1970 Kent State University shootings of students by National Guardsmen, where they were also students. As they attempted to make sense of the tragedy, their resulting rock band was named DEVO, or short for de-evolution.

That way, the band members as “social scientists” aimed to satirically comment on humanity descending into a state of moral and physical regression. And they shot the 1976 short film In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution, directed by Chuck Statler and starring Castle, Jim Mothersbaugh, Mark Mothersbaugh and Robert Mothersbaugh.

“It had two songs, but we were doing music with pictures pretty much from the beginning,” Mothersbaugh recalled. DEVO also gained a following with hit satirical songs like “Whip It” and “Mongoloid” in the wake of the 1950s Atomic Bomb scare and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that, like generative artificial intelligence today, posed a possible extinction risk for humanity, the band frontman insisted.

“With the atomic bomb, there were a lot of different opportunities for something really stupid and horrifying to happen. It could be the same with AI, with many things that are dark and not for the betterment of humans,” Mothersbaugh explained. While occasionally touring with DEVO, he has become a prolific composer of music for movies, TV series and commercials and video games.

“It’s like another set of colors of paint to work with,” Mothersbaugh adds about composing being a part of his wider ambition as a multi-media artist that includes scores to The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street. Having written music for around 100 film and TV series, he has worked extensively with Wes Anderson on Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

“He’s a true artist,” Mothersbaugh says of his symbiotic collaboration with Anderson in his Sunset Boulevard studio in Los Angeles where they would discuss original DEVO synthesizers and other vintage gear to create quirky soundscapes for movie orchestrations. “(Anderson) spent more time with me than a lot of directors did.”

Mothersbaugh also worked closely with Taika Waititi on his 2017 Marvel superhero pic Thor: Ragnarok, which led to an ‘80s-tinged score with hints of superhero anthems. And to his side on set was often a curious Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, the producer behind the most successful run of movies in Hollywood.

“I didn’t even know who he (Feige) was at first. He’d come in when I was playing music for Taika, and there’d be this guy sitting there. And then we started talking and he was really interested,” Mothersbaugh recounted. And he was also working with Waititi as he graduated from making arthouse movies to the big-budget superhero movie world.

“Taika went from being this little guy in New Zealand to all of a sudden being in charge of this giant film costing $100 million, $150 million, whatever it costs,” Mothersbaugh said of the Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit director making his mark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The DEVO frontman is currently juggling composing music for three feature films, alongside TV series and video games.

“I do love writing music and I do love making art and I feel so fortunate,” he said. That leaves little room for thoughts of retirement, which Mothersbaugh did bring up with his wife and manager Anita Greenspan, but only briefly. “My wife told me, you’re not going to retire. You’ll slump over the podium and they’ll lift you up and carry you out of the room. That’s how you’re going to go,” he recalled of her response.

That grim death foretold concerns Mothersbaugh, he admits. “It makes me nervous, because she’s also my agent,” he said.