Devo (pronounced either DEE-vo or de-VO, sometimes spelled Dev-O and often "DEVO") is an American rock music music group formed in Akron, Ohio in 1972.
Their style has been variously classified as punk, industrial and rock, but are most often considered to be the 70s/early 80s New Wave band that ushered in the synth pop of the 1980s, along with other acts such as Gary Numan, Oingo Boingo, and The B-52's.
Devo's music and stage show mingle kitsch science fiction themes, deadpan surrealist humor, and mordantly satirical social commentary in sometimes- discordant pop songs that often feature unusual synthetic instrumentation and time signatures.
Their work has proved hugely influential on subsequent popular music, particularly New Wave, alternative and grunge music, they created some memorable music videos popular in the early days of MTV.
Devo first performed on April 18, 1973 as the "Sextet Devo" at Kent State University's Creative Arts Festival at Recital Hall. Founders Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh, and Bob Lewis were students at Kent State at the time the National Guard shot and killed four students at a protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia--the "pivotal moment" in their founding, according to Casale.
It's sometimes maintained that the inspiration for the band's name and underlying philosophy came from Oscar Kiss Maerth's "The Beginning Was the End", a pseudoscientific anthropological thesis that attributes the rise of man to an evolutionary accident caused by a species of sex-crazed, cannibalistic apes who developed tools to exploit each other sexually and feed on each others' brains. (See Devolution (fallacy).) However, Casale and Lewis developed their own quack theories of regression and simplification long before actually finding a copy of Maerth's work, and their use of reductio ad absurdum as metaphor is carried throughout Devo's work as a commentary on modern society.