Whip It: The Pynchon connection

[Jay Herzog]

Jerry Casale of DEVO:

"Whip It," like many Devo songs, had a long gestation, a long process.
The lyrics were written by me as an imitation of Thomas Pynchon's
parodies in his book Gravity's Rainbow. He had parodied limericks and
poems of kind of all-American, obsessive, cult of personality ideas
like Horatio Alger and "You're #1, there's nobody else like you" kind
of poems that were very funny and very clever. So I thought, I'd like
to do one like Thomas Pynchon, so I wrote down "Whip It" one night.

Mark had recorded some sketches for song ideas in his apartment, and
when we'd get together every day to write, rehearse and practice, we
would listen to everybody's snippets of ideas. He had this tape with
about 8 things on it, and one of them had a drum beat that was very
interesting, it became the "Whip It" drum beat. Then 3 other songs had
pieces of what became the "Whip It" song, except they were in
different time signatures and different tempos. I put them all
together into one composition. All the parts of the song got rolled
into one song. Then we started putting the lyrics over the top of it
and liked the idea of how it was working out, so we started practicing
it every day, until it got to the point where we really liked it and
we thought it was really snappy. Then we recorded it. We didn't like
it any better or any less than any of the other songs we were doing,
and we had no idea it would become a hit.





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