DEVO's "I Desire"

I've been thinking hard about desire. It's important! Have you thought about desire lately?

There's a DEVO song called "I Desire." It's easy to remember it when I've been thinking about desire, because the phrase "I Desire" gets repeated a lot.

Well, that inspired me to look up the lyrics. And, wow. I love them.

Not only could I see this song serving as the seeds of a loving declaration, a kind of clown manifesto, a Yin to Clash Clown's Yang (the lyrics to Clampdown) - but "I Desire" encapsulates so much of what I love about DEVO: underneath the stiff, bizarro soundscape satirizing the corporate devolved future they predicted...there are some seriously thoughtful subversive humanism lyrics.

And then I scrolled down to learn from Genius.com...Devo’s most controversial song, “I Desire’s” lyrics consist of poetry written by John Hinckley, Jr., the attempted assassin of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Mark Mothersbaugh would later admit, “It was not the best career move you could make. We had the FBI calling up and threatening us.”

My mind zoomed to this TikTok making the rounds.

I don't know, man. It's smarter and way simpler to reaffirm my allegiance to the lyrics to Wavy Gravy's classic, Basic Human Needs.