In article <3r3h71$s3@news.infoserve.net>, thescum@unix.infoserve.net
(Byron Jacquot) wrote:
> : Is it true that Mark Mothersbaugh is a fat, rich, conspiracy asshole
> : now?
>
No, that is not true. Mark Mothersbaugh is one of the funniest
sons-a-bitches you'd ever hope to yak with, and his skills continue to
FLOOR me. Just because he's able to both make a buck and continue to
produce TOTAL WEIRDNESS on the side is no reason to GAINSAY a GREAT
SUBGENIUS. Unless you're INTENSELY JEALOUS. Then you should go ahead and
falsely accuse anyone you know very little about. You have that right, the
right to FAIL MISERABLY and make a JACKASSS of yourself. Or, instead, you
could create a musical form that influenced almost all electro-musioc done
since, and then try to make up for all the poverty you suffered for doing
so.
I had reason to "interview" Dr. Mothersbaugh recently. I myself have been
interviewed a lot lately, espevcially by email, and it had finally sunk in
that I was doing all the work, while the writers doing the interviewing
were getting paid. So I decided to turn it around. I would get my
celebrity friends to do the work, and I'D get paid.
This might show up in WIRED. If it does, I get paid.
You should now badmouth me for "selling out." In fact, let's all badmouth
anybody who gets paid for anything. Only that which leaves one depressed
and penniless is respectable among the p.c. critic elite, right?
Anyway, here's some news about Mutato Musica. I didn't record and
transcribe the conversation, because my little recording deck broke and I
can't afford a proper one with a line input (into which I can plug the
suction-cup Radio Shack phone-recording-mike) until I sell some articles.
So it's just a summary. WIRED didn't want more than 500 words but, as
usual, I could only provide twice that.
*****
Mark Mothersbaugh
He Brought Home the Bacon So That No One Knew
by Rev. Ivan Stang
You'd hardly recognize Mark Mothersbaugh from his DEVO days, he says. He
sports a Cyclops look following radical cosmetic alteration; through the
use of orthopedic clamps and painful surgery, he's had his right eye
gradually shifted to the middle of his forehead. (The left eye was ditched
entirely.) When the bandages come off, he figures it'll inspire hundreds
of Hollywood copycats.
In the meantime, he's been one busy spudboy, with all twelve fingers
imbedded in at least a dozen different pies, some of them really gooey.
His music company, Mutato Muzika in L.A., has brought him so much success
that he rarely gets any sleep. Companies give him musicless videotapes, he
slaves 'em to his computer, and, sooner or later, they come back out not
only musically scored, but loaded to the gills with whatever subliminals
struck his fancy.
First the forces of normality tried to kill DEVO, then DEVO tried to kill
itself. But DEVO refuses to die, even now that society itself has become
DEVO. The Mothersbaugh and Casale boys reunited for the Tank Girl movie
title song, a re-do of the classic Girl U Want, as well as a new song
for... get ready... the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers movie. Mark says
that most of these songs only involve two or three words of lyrics; he
charges a certain amount per word, and throws in the music and subliminals
for free. When somebody's mounting a really big-buck production, they'll
request as many as five or six words.
His name's been scrolling by at breakneck speed in the credits of several
TV shows -- the weirder kid stuff like Rug Rats, Beakman's World, and
Medicine Ball, as well as Sliders . Now he's got five new shows to deal
with. Two for Nickelodeon include Kevin's Kitchen and Santo Bigito ( a
cartoon about cockroaches living in a border town between Texas and
Mexico). For Fox he's scoring a couple of sitcoms, Two Something and If
Not for You, as well as a promising weirdness fest called Strange Luck
(from the producer of Eerie, Indiana).
Then there are the commercials. Mothersbaugh has been packing subliminals
into ad jingles for years now. He was cautious about it at first, back in
the Hawaaian Punch days, but the more he uses, the better the ad boys like
it. Of course, since the extra warped-out verbal sounds are subliminals,
he can tell the client they say one thing, when they actually say
something else entirely. He's especially fond of imbedding the words
"SUBMIT! OBEY!", along with more personal brainwashing lines like "Praise
Bob" and "We smell sausage" (which is "Jesus loves you" backwards).
Current clients include Nike and 7-Up. Listen closely.
THEN there are the movie scores, which Mothersbaugh creates pretty much
solo. He scored The New Age last year; one of his favorite upcoming ones
is The Flesh Suitcase, a Blood Simple type story involving the
misadventures of drug smugglers waiting to excrete balloons of dope out of
their colons. Another is The Last Supper, a sick comedy in which right
wing redneck Bill Paxton dares some liberal grad students to kill him, and
after they take him up on it, they move on to murdering fundamentalists,
gay-bashers, "Limbaugh," etc. Mark also toiled as Music Producer for
Quentin Tarrantino's Four Rooms, working with Combustible Edison.
THEN there are the CD-ROM games. Mutato provided the music and sound
effects for Propaganda/Sony's Johnny Mnemonic CD-ROM, and Mark and Gerald
Casale codesigned from the get-go the DEVO-based Inscape game, Adventures
of The Smart Patrol.
Mark hasn't yet had the nerve to look in on alt.fan.devo, but he's working
more and more interactivity into Mutato Muzika. He's interested not so
much in creating CD software that's fancier than the last big hit and
requires expensive new processors to run, but the opposite -- quick,
bare-bones ornamental programs, "little dingleberries" as he calls them,
valuable more for concept than for complexity, distributed and marketed
entirely through the Net. Downloadable stuff that makes you slap your
forehead and say, "Now, why didn't I think of that!" Just exactly what
these "dingleberries" might actually be is still top secret, but one of
Mark's goals in music was to find the exact subsonic tone that would cause
the audience's bowels to loosen uncontrollably. So extrapolate from there.
DEVOtees can find a non-Mothersbaughian website, set up by fans and
archivists, at http://www.nvg.unit.no/~optimus/devo/index.html.
-- Rev. Ivan Stang
--
Copyright 1995 by Rev. Ivan Stang / 1st Orthodox Stangian
MegaFisTemple Lodge of People's Covenant Church of the
Wrath of Dobbs Yeti, Resurrected / The SubGenius Foundation,Inc.
PO Box 140306 Dallas TX 75214 / Fax 214-320-1561 / PRABOB
Original file name: DEVOtees
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