(7) Devo, “Satisfaction”
rusted
(11) The Cardigans, “Iron Man”
338-201
and will play in the elite 8

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/23/22.

ERIN BELIEU ON DEVO’S “SATISFACTION”

It’s October 14th, 1978, Omaha, Nebraska, and I’ve been a teenager just shy of three weeks.
It’s the year I begin creeping down to the TV room once my parents are in bed, sitting in my dad’s surpassingly ugly recliner, smoking the leftover ends of the four cigarettes that framed his after-supper ritual: four Larks, four Triscuits, each topped with a sweaty square of Colby cheese, and four Manhattans.
By 10pm, I knew he and my mom (with her own best time in this nightly liquid marathon) couldn’t clock an oom-pah band marching through the house. I’ve come down this evening to watch Saturday Night Live. For a girl living in the Brigadoon-like mists of Nebraska, my weekly illicit viewings of SNL are proof of life.
Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that being thirteen sucks. Or it should be. I still recall the intensity of how terrible it feels to be that age. The enraging in-betweenness of it—too young for the older kids to bother with, but a galaxy beyond the babies you’re stuck “watching” at the card table end of Thanksgiving.
I’ll make the further case that being thirteen in 1978 was above average terrible: economy tanked, oil prices stratospheric, the Cold War still slouching on, a machine whose reason or purpose no one seemed to remember; Son of Sam’s trial on the nightly news, and that terrible picture on the cover of Time magazine, countless bodies splayed where they’d dropped after drinking the purple Kool Aid.
1978 also wins for peak divorce rate in America. Whatever spackle held the grown-ups together had rotted away over the course of the decade, as more and more of my friends were contractually obligated to spend weekends sleeping at their fathers’ divorce-sad one-bedroom apartments. Moms now had boyfriends, sketchy guys with receding hairlines named Denny and Cliff. Two of the kids in my neighborhood had uncles living in their basements, soldiers come home but not quite returned from Vietnam.
And the music. Uff. It was bleak from my position—that is, as a white girl from a suburban family barely clinging to the middle class, raised in an aggressively segregated midwestern city. I caught flashes on the periphery (from American Bandstand and Soul Train on Saturday mornings) that something musically vital was happening somewhere, but it wasn’t music to which I had real access back in the informational Before Times.
I had the soporifically wholesome stylings of “the Ol’ Redhead” Don Cole on KFAB AM radio announcing the treacly ballads that defined that year in pop music, a slough of already overplayed rock “classics,” the Gibb brothers’ Hydra-headed disco juggernaut, and the “Desperado” singer-songwriters whose stale “You know I gotta ramble, girl” machismo hit me as up its own ass even at that tender age. A perfume capturing the mainstream musical essence of 1978 in America would contain notes of ditch weed, Velveeta casserole, and polyester slacks (worn commando).
So I’m sitting in my dad’s chair smoking butts and regretting my nascent life when SNL’s host Fred Willard announces that week’s musical guest, some unknown band called Devo that in the next couple minutes will permanently alter how I perceive…well, everything.
As is true of any wildly original art that kicks the door open for much of what follows, the event of Devo’s appearance that night (back when we had three channels to choose from, and maybe PBS if you got the TV antenna pointed just right), this happening live on nationwide TV—it’s hard to capture the super-size audacity of their performance in our present time when you can experience everything anywhere always.
The danger-yellow biohazard suits, the evil-toy choreography—they looked like animatronic aliens who’d landed their spaceship in the uncanny valley. With unfashionably lean and punchy drums (especially compared to the era’s prog rock behemoths) and rhythm guitars laying out a tweaky, industrial through line, the song’s opening bars have more in common with Antheil’s score for Ballet Mécanique than anything the American public identified as a pop music at that point in history.
It’s not until Mark Mothersbaugh rips into his sugar-cereal amped version of the iconic hook of “Satisfaction” that you recognize this controlled demolition as a cover of one of the world’s most famous songs. The glitching robot vocals (Mothersbaugh spitting his famous “babybabybabybabybabybabybabybabybaby” line like a possessed gumball machine), Gerald Casale’s boingy, Looney Tunes bass putting the party in the proceedings—they were the exact musical definition of “WTF??”; a weirdo bolt of lightning that shook the audience to their boogie (oogie oogie) shoes. It took Devo a little over two ferociously tight and catchy minutes that night to plant their harpoon in the bloated, boring, and twee nonsense clogging the airwaves at the time.

While our subject is cover songs, I’ll admit I have a hard time calling Devo’s version of “Satisfaction” a cover. That’s a toothless word for the Derridean surgery they perform on The Stones’ charismatic, seductive but ultimately backward-facing original. As T.S. Eliot said—who knew from demolishing traditions—“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”
By this standard, Devo’s futuristic deconstruction of “Satisfaction” works as a crime-of-the-decade heist, hijacking the Stones’ song into something indelibly and completely their own. Respect to Mick Jagger for approving their use of the song, but what Devo does to “Satisfaction” has no basis in homage. The bluesy, roadhouse sex appeal that defines the Stones’ music is ruptured unto death by Devo’s mordantly playful amalgamation of Dadaism, Nihilistic philosophy, postmodern satire, and sci-fi kitsch, pressurized into the ear wiggy-ness of the corporate jingle structures they origamied into scathingly political pop music. And beneath the performance art drag, Devo had the added virtue of looking completely ordinary to their audience, genetic “spuds” as they called themselves—nothing like the sex panthers, renaissance fair troubadours and Valhalla cosplayers folks were used to. For all their obvious smarts and art house surreality, Devo was appealingly DIY for the kids who discovered them that night, both musically and visually; non-descript dudes indistinguishable from the college guys sacking groceries at my local Hinky Dinky. 
Of course, I didn’t have any of this language or context at 13, only a freshly minted teenager’s heat seeking radar for music so fresh and exciting—SO FUCKING NEW—that it left me slightly alarmed, disturbingly aroused and usefully confused. And I wasn’t alone.
Soon after their appearance on SNL, some of the certifiably coolest boys at the neighborhood high school covered Devo’s “Satisfaction” at the annual talent show causing a joyous riot that became immediate legend every kid in town heard about. A friend of mine, a well-known novelist (name redacted for the sake of personal dignity), told me after seeing their SNL performance he immediately dismantled his shower curtain and wore it around his tiny, conservative hometown to feel “Devo-esque,” despite the serious abuse he took from the normie kids (and proving once again being in the vanguard isn’t for the weak). My response was to start regularly pedaling my bike the 4 miles (uphill! Without permission!) to the closest record store, using my chore money to raid the bins for music I learned was called “New Wave”: Elvis Costello, B-52s, Talking Heads, The Pretenders, Blondie (and bless you, Chrissie & Debbie, for showing me women were damn well included too).
Seemingly overnight, it was a glorious time to be thirteen.
It’s a mystery to me and no small shame that on a recent stroll through the Internet I found surprisingly few “10 Greatest Covers of All-Time” lists that include Devo’s “Satisfaction.” I don’t even understand how that’s possible.
For many music nerds and budding musicians, Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction” was a seminal moment in their early lives, a Schedule 1 introduction leading directly to the dive clubs and rumpus rooms of punk and new wave that would quickly infiltrate and reshape music worldwide.
Maybe Devo is considered more “performance art” than music to your more parochial sorts? Too equally committed to the satiric videos (MTV soon made ubiquitous) for the crankier purists to approve? Perhaps some simply take a pass on their music’s avant-garde complexities and experimentation?
Or maybe Devo is ultimately too Cassandra-like for some list makers with their upsettingly unsentimental “Jocko Homo” critique of post human devolution, zombie consumerism, and cannibalistic capitalism? I mean, nobody’s gonna vote Devo’s music most likely to get you laid.
I suppose this last reason makes the most sense to me. Little more than a year after Devo’s performance of “Satisfaction” on SNL, Ronald Reagan (*shudder*) won the presidency, ejaculating a backlash of fifties nostalgia porn as cultural “corrective” to the “dangerous” ideas unleashed by the Civil Rights, LGBTQIA+ and Women’s Liberation movements. During Reagan’s first administration, it remains in memory the only time I ever openly swore at my father—a public school administrator—paradoxically dedicated to working in lower income schools for 40 years—who ended up voting for Reagan not once, but twice. “WHY DON’T YOU JUST SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FUCKING HEAD, DAD? IT’D BE A LOT QUICKER.”
So the great and greedy sleep of white America recommenced in the 80s with a revenant’s vengeance. In his second term, Ol’ Purplehead openly trolled the nation, using Bruce Springsteen’s obviously and indisputably brutal “Born In The USA” as his feel good campaign song while Alex P. Keaton clones were more than satisfied to dance along mindlessly in their whale print turtlenecks and Topsiders.
It’s hard not to think the human devolution Devo informed us of starting in the late 70s is all but complete in the apocalypse-adjacent aftermath of another racist, bigoted, and corrupt D-List actor’s presidency. That night on SNL, Devo delivered a message to the nation—a musical harbinger of the future soon to come--but hasn’t this always been America’s most singularly defining feature—not hearing what we don’t want to hear?
(“Freedom from choice, it’s what we want.”)

Erin Belieu is the author of five poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including 2021's Come-Hither Honeycomb. Recent work has appeared in the New York Times, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, and Kenyon Review. Belieu lives in Houston where she teaches for the University of Houston's MFA/Ph.D. program in Creative Writing.

THE CARDIGANS COVERING BLACK SABBATH’S “IRON MAN” EXPLORES A MORE FEMININE APOCALYPSE BY KATIE DARBY MULLINS

If given the choice, I’d choose ‘surprise’ over ‘predictable’ with any cover song, even if the production quality suffered. I’m not alone in this: it’s why Limp Bizkit’s ill-advised cover of George Michael’s “Faith” charted. Sure, many people—even people you love, maybe even you!—just really like rap-rock and nu metal, but most people who listened in were a little surprised-then-delighted to hear someone scream over shrieking guitars and a battery of percussion what Michael had whispered like pillow talk over an acoustic a decade earlier. Tori Amos released Strange Little Girls and covered only male songwriters; years later, Kyle Craft’s Girl Crazy covered only women, and in both cases, the musicians played hard and fast with genre. That’s my kind of cover record: for a song to need covering, you almost have to feel like you, the artist, can say something new about the art without changing the essence completely. You can play with form, you can play with tone; you can drop a rap verse or add one. But for a cover to really stand out as essential, it has to use the same basic outline that the original does and then say something totally different in effect.
“Wait, wait. You’ll recognize it. Like, immediately,” I said to a friend, typing furiously on Apple Music. I didn’t want Siri to give away the surprise.
Five seconds, a drum shuffle, and then—there it is—Nina Persson’s perfect baby-doll declaration: “I am Iron Man!”
It took a moment for my friend to stop laughing, but then they said, “No,” kind of softly, almost like they didn’t want to know how bad the rest of the song was going to be. They were as shocked as everyone always is by how alluring this version is, though no one can put their finger on why at first listen.
     By the way, you know Nina Persson’s voice. You might have to close your eyes and remember when you were, like, wearing slip dresses over t-shirts with platform sneakers, when her band The Cardigans’ song “Lovefool” was on a constant loop on pop radio stations. The same quality that leads her to say, “So/ I cried/ And cried in my bed” kicks off the band’s cover of “Iron Man,” and then, like in that hit, her voice immediately strengthens a little, except instead of saying, “Love me, love me, say that you love me,” she’s singing, “Has he lost his mind?/ Can he see or is he blind?”
I understand if you need to look this up before proceeding. Actually, I think you should: if you haven’t heard The Cardigans taking on Black Sabbath, a Swedish pop act covering a UK-based metal band, you really should know how disconcerting it is. Years and years later when Robert Downey Jr. would confidently say, “I am Iron Man” at the end of the first Iron Man movie, I sometimes like to pretend he is doing his best job to cover the delight and surprise in Persson’s delivering of the same line. There is almost a moment of discovery, of becoming, before the playful bass line and shuffle-percussion clicks in and locks the song into a chill, anesthetized BPM.
And every time I hear it I think, “Oh, thank God. Someone else gets it.”

Have you ever been the only chick in the record store? Things are a little better now, but it used to be that you only had two choices. Overcompensate and blow the person at the counter away with knowledge so quickly that they don’t have time to underestimate you, or buckle up for a long talk on how The Beatles all went on to have some degree of success as solo artists. (That is an actual conversation I’ve sat through. For the record, my father taught me how to flip and change a record when I was two or three so that I could listen to the White Album all the way through.)  It’s better than being the only chick in the guitar store (“Do you know if you play an acoustic or electric? Is it your boyfriend’s?”), and MUCH better than being the only chick at a hardcore show (“Wow. You have really big tits”). I’m telling you this because by the time I was eleven, I organized my CDs alphabetically within the record label, then chronologically within the artist. I used to agonize over whether or not to put artists like Richie Furay with Poco, or whether to split Madonna’s records by when she started Maverick. What to do about mergers? Capricorn? Chrysalis? The Rolling Stones, who famously left Decca?
What does any of that have to do with The Cardigans?
     I have spent my life so immersed and washed in music that I couldn’t stand to be away from it. It was my first true love, and when I met my husband, I fell madly in love with him over a conversation about music. Later, he’d email me that the moment reminded him of a line from a Counting Crows song—my favorite band—and I’d know far too soon that I would marry him. And this thing I love so much, this art that I have spent my life studying and trying to learn how to write about—well, every time I try to participate in the community in public and they don’t know my day job, I get told who The Beatles are or that my tits are big. My guess is that a lot of women at Sabbath shows, especially in the hey-day, got similar treatment. I can only imagine.
Are you here with your boyfriend?
So do you think Ozzy’s cute or something?
Take off your top!
     I’m willing to bet that no one yelled that at women who went to The Cardigans’ shows. “Iron Man” is a great song, and Sabbath is a great band. They made some important music and ushered in a type of mainstream heavy that is still essential today. The way the guitar storms into the original is iconic for a reason. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to be a metal fan, especially one encased in the body I live in.
As The Cardigans’ version of the song drops in, it feels like it’s filtered through an old radio: there’s a separation between Persson’s vocals and the rest of the world, like she’s singing under glass. Or maybe we’re under glass: she seems to be completely immersed in the narrative of “Iron Man.” It doesn’t hurt that the bridge takes on a totally new meaning with the slowed down, Valium-cloud vocals on “Nobody wants him/ They just turn their heads/ Nobody helps him/ Now he has his revenge.” It feels not quite like pity, but nothing like the frustrating battle cry it was in the original, either. It almost feels as though the narrator understands there’s a deep sadness in being pushed to revenge via rejection. The be-bop outro also feels like it contradicts the tone of the original.
     The song is apocalyptic. This is a machine-man who has seen the future and knows of our destruction. Unlike Bowie’s alien Ziggy Stardust, he’s not warning us that we only have five year—he’s stomping around with boots of lead. This is a creature unlike us in some way, something separate from humanity. (And no, it’s not about the superhero, even though it plays over the credits in some movie with the same title.) Ozzy understood that the appeal of writing this powerful non-human was that time and space didn’t apply to Iron Man.
Persson’s interpretation manages to pull that same truth off, but with a degree of pathos about the end of it all. I think as we’re all seeing terrifying headlines and contemplating what our future looks like, globally, it’s not bizarre to think of The Cardigans’ “Iron Man” as the more emotionally in-touch look at the destruction caused by war machines. By taking the hyper-masculine, overdriven and fuzzed out metal of Black Sabbath and turning it into a slinky pop song with muted, concerned vocals, Persson and The Cardigans have managed to honor the original song—which is, rightfully, a rock standard—while still evoking a tenderness and sorrow that the original doesn’t quite touch. Make no mistake, that’s because it didn’t want to: when the time comes for fighting, you can observe the sorrow of it all from behind glass or you can go in raging. Neither is right or wrong. But by opening the song up with hyper-femininity, Persson creates a space for women at the table: it allows us to take on the strange animal of Iron Man, the visage of something that knows danger is coming, and to live in the moment where our rejection can be avenged.
That feels like a natural fantasy for women who participate in music to me. I love when I get to sing along, discover myself again in the foreign, and chirp, “I am Iron Man!” 

Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. In addition to being nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times, she's been published or has work forthcoming in journals like Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Iron Horse, Harpur Palate, Prime Number, and the music magazine The Aquarian. She helped found and is the executive writer for Underwater Sunshine Fest, a music festival in NYC, and her first book, Neuro, Typical: Chemical Reactions & Trauma Bonds came out on Summer Camp Press in late 2020.