Whip It: The Pynchon connection

[rich]

funny

I think I like their version of Satisfaction more than the original

listening to Rush was never the same after Devo

On 9/14/09, Jay Herzog <zogboy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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