Like most people who hadn't given it much thought, I didn't think of Devo as being much beyond "Whip It." Pete was a fan when I met him and when he mentioned it, I started to say "you mean that 'Whip It' band--?" and he cut me off because that's what everyone says. Fair. He put some tracks on early mixtapes and I quickly became a fan as well.
I do celebrate much of Devo's catalog and it was a little hard to pick one. I have favorites, but no one specific one. I selected "Space Junk" because it was probably the deepest cut of the bunch. Second place goes to "Mongoloid," which I would suspect is a lot of people's favorites. I tried to get Pete to cover that one. I'd even roughly planned visuals for it. It was going to be about how Danny Tanner is the subject of the song but Pete flatly said "I'm not covering Devo" and that was it. I could have also selected "Uncontrollable Urge" or "Freedom of Choice," which would have been less fun to write about.
I also could have very easily picked "Don't Shoot (I'm a Man)" from their 2010 album, a surprisingly strong one. It was on that tour that I saw them play for the first and only time at THE OHIO STATE FAIR. It was a weird show. Most of the crowd was old enough to have been 20 when "Whip It" came out. Also it was at THE OHIO STATE FAIR. Devo were great though. I remember they played "Beautiful World" over underwater footage of the Keystone pipeline oil spill. It was then that I realized that we will always need Devo.
My relationship with this band is complicated by the fact that Jerry Casale recently married someone who was in high school with the Catscan! boys. The Catscan! boys who are significantly younger than I. They also had this weird 9/11-themed wedding. I guess he's backtracked on the wedding theme, saying it was a "surprise." OK. Even if it was, he still married a woman who was in high school with the Catscan! boys. For reference, it was really fucking tasteless: https://consequenceofsound.net/2015/09/devos-jerry-casale-had-a-911-themed-wedding/