In the Feburary, 1982 edition of Trouser Press there was a co-interview with Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbough of Devo and William S. Burroughs.


JC:We base our aesthtic on self-depracating humour. We include ourselves in it. But obviously there's something behind it. We have that sense--maye that's the midwestern part--that sense of shame about being human.


WSB: Everybody does. That's part of being human.


JC: But dealing with it and admitting it is rare. The masses are bad spuds who resort to defense mechanisms like fundamentalist religion and other psychotic values, far-rightists who deny it becuase they cannot deal with it. They've worked themselves into a constipated corner where to admit it is threatning to the rigid order they created. Good spuds have the ability to make fun of themselves. . . . . .

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JC: De-evolution is basically an extended joke that was as valid an explanation of anything as the Bible is, a mythology for people to believe in. We were just attacking the ideas humans have that they're at the center of the universe--that they're important, that they must be immortal, that there must be a Guide. The whole (what we think of as inverted) valued system that precipitates every cultural/political form follows from it.


WSB: Essentially monotheism-Christ and Muhhamad. Incidentally, Muhamadan fundamentalists are fully as bad as Bible-beaters; in fact, I think they're worse.


JC (to mark): See, we've been leaving them out.


WSB: They're more used to killing, for one thing; it comes more naturlally to them. In Egypt they have seen these people as a political mass, and the same thing could happen here. Fundamentalists are seen in Egypt as subersive, as a political danger to the regime. They're the ones who killed Sadat. It's as if Jerry Fallwell's boys had assasinated President Raegan.


JC: If there's anything important about history, it's that stupidity wins. We're paranoid for good reasons: hunderds of years where assholes take over, knowledge is lost and things go backwards. We quesiton the whole theory concerning progress, and the middle-class idea of a "better life."