from the LP Freedom Of Choice, Warner Bros Records, 1980The 1970 massacre at Kent State University stands as one of our nation’s turning points, an event which epitomized the divide running through the whole country at that time, something which basically ended the idea of peaceful resistance & also predicted the direction that groups like the Weather Underground would take in retaliation for what was increasingly seen as something of a social-civil war. Some people who witnessed the tragedy that day were so appalled and moved by the events that it ignited creative fires deep within their souls, wrought from the stress of a seemingly imploding world. One notable example of this is the band Devo, threee members of which were students at Kent during the shootings and had already discussed the idea that our human race might actually be “devolving” into a more basal species, and they have often been quoted as saying that the events that day were the ultimate catalyst for them deciding to form a band. They carried these ideas forward with them for almost a decade before things started to happen, and their informed, smart-assed approach to sociological observation proved the perfect fit for an angsty, new wave of cold war kids---funny thing is, I doubt many of them understood that Devo was often pointing their empirical surveillance the youth’s way, “…in ancient Rome, there was a poem, about a dog, who found two bones; he picked at one, he licked the other, he went in circles, he dropped dead… freedom of choice, is what you got; freedom from choice, is what you want…” Culturally, we continue to be bombarded by exponentially more & more shit than ever before, perhaps correlating to the increasing state of disconnect up in here. Maybe these crafty nerds were on to something…
