Beautiful World - 2010 Remaster

Don't let this one fool you. Most of this song is about how wonderful the world is, a "sweet romantic plac with beautiful people everywhere." But at the end, it turns around with the line, "But not for me." Jerry Casale of Devo told Songfacts: "We wanted to get everybody into a mood where people thought Devo was saying the world was really nice and saying the world was beautiful, then it turns out to be one man's opinion, which is mine, which is, while the world could be beautiful, it's not for me because of what I'm seeing."

Devo was founded by Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, who were both at Kent State University when four unarmed students were shot to death by the US National Guard. This had a profound effect on Jerry and Mark, who developed the idea of "De-evolution," meaning that humans were devolving rather than evolving. Devo made short films to accompany their songs with the idea of releasing them on Laser Disc, a promising technology that was a huge failure. Even though Laser Discs didn't work out, MTV launched in 1981 and created a market for music videos. With very few videos to choose from, they put Devo's "Whip It" in heavy rotation, but when music videos became more common, MTV abandoned Devo.

Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale tried to sing like Stan Ridgway of Wall Of Voodoo ("Mexican Radio") on this track. "I don't know why, but we could imagine Stan singing that song," Mothersbaugh said. "So we were both trying to fake his accent and Jerry did a great job so he ended up singing on the record."