Devo's Freedom of Choice (33 1/3). This item is unavailable.Devo's Freedom of Choice (33 1/3)

Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decades high-tech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980s Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald Casale calls his alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip.

Before an artistic and commercial decline that resulted in a 20-year gap between Devos last two studio records, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars, vindicated but ultimately betrayed by the birth of MTV. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. Through first-hand accounts from the band and musical analysis set against an examination of new waves emergence, the first-ever authorized book about Devo (with a foreword by Portlandias Fred Armisen) explores the groups peak of success, when their hermetic seal cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, and plenty of misunderstandings. Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence–it turned out to be the high point before the s***storm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number, says Casale. Its where everything changes.

Evie Nagy is an arts and business journalist who has been a staff editor and writer at Rolling Stone, Billboard and Fast Company. She lives in Oakland, CA.