Jocko Homo

In a Songfacts interview with Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale of Devo, Mothersbaugh explained: "'Jocko Homo' was one of the first songs I wrote for the band. The whole song was meant to be a theme song for the theory of de-evolution and for Devo, what we were about. It was meant to lay out the story right there. It was a collection of discussions we had where we sat around in Kent after students had been shot, and decided that what we were seeing happening on the planet, when we looked at the news and read the paper, was not evolution but was more appropriately described as de-evolution."

Jocko Homo means "Monkey Man." Mothersbaugh was a student at Kent State University when a friend gave him a pamphlet called "Jocko Homo, Heaven Bound King of the Apes." It was a religious pamphlet debunking evolution, explaining how absurd the idea was that a man would descend from a monkey. The pamphlet was printed in the '30s by a religious zealot from Rogers, Ohio. One of the pictures showed a devil pointing up a staircase that said "2 million years along the stairway to heaven." The devil had 'De-Evolution' written on his chest and was laughing and pointing up the stairs. The stairs had names like slavery, world war, drunkenness, adultery - it kept going with horrible attributes of man.

Jerry Casale told Songfacts that "Jocko Homo" was Devo's "position statement." "It was our mission statement saying, 'Hey look, humans are making up stories about why we're here and how we got here and who we are and what our importance is and it's all basically rubbish, it's absurd," he said. "You don't know what's going on, and that's OK. In fact, if you admit you don't know what's going on and you admit there are alternative explanations for things, then you're already better off, and there's a lot of things you won't do because you'd quit believing in ridiculous things that drive you to actions that cause more pain and suffering in the world.' It was kind of a Dada, self-effacing kind of statement, like, 'Look, we're all pinheads here on this planet together.'"