Devo, Eno and the Monkey Chant

An exploration of fifteen seconds of "Jocko Homo"

The following is a blog post from July 9, 2014.

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Devo play a special set of their early material, mostly culled from the recently reissued Hardcore Devo compilation, at Oakland’s Fox Theater. [Ed: the show was professionally shot and released on DVD. Of course it’s on YouTube.] Despite being down one member - as singer/keyboardist Mark Mothersbaugh’s masked alter ego Booji Boy so succinctly put it, “Bob 2 clocked out” - it was an excellent, raw performance; the chance to see Devo be a garage band again. An ancient synthesizer even broke down onstage.

During that night’s rendition of “Jocko Homo,” Mothersbaugh engaged his bandmates and the audience in a call-and-response section before the song’s bridge with which I was unfamiliar. I wasn’t alone - in fact, only a fraction of the audience responded. More on that later.

In the ensuing Devo renaissance I’ve undergone, I stumbled across this interview with Mothersbaugh for The Wire’s Invisible Jukebox. In it, he recalled the infamous conflict between the band and producer Brian Eno during the making of the band’s debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo! The band, having extensively demoed the tracks in advance of the sessions, were resistant to Eno’s left-field production ideas and techniques; most of the producer’s overdubs never made the final mix, and in fact, many of the tracks from the Hardcore comp strongly resemble their officially released counterparts. Mothersbaugh did, however, reveal one of Eno’s deviations from the demos that did make the released LP:

MM: He put a loop on “Jocko Homo” - that chakachakcachacka, with the singers from, not Nepal, not Thailand, somewhere. Same place where the gamelan guys come from?

RH: What, like Bali or Java? The [Ramayana] monkey chant…

MM: Yeah, the monkey chant. And he put that into… I’m sure the word “monkey” in the song “Jocko Homo” set it off. But it was a really great loop to put inside “Jocko Homo”. And we worked with him, there was no midi so, we kind of slowed down what we did a bit, and he put it on a piece of tape and put it on a spindle so he could change the speed by hand and he synched up the monkey chants for about a 20 second, 15 second little piece in “Jocko Homo” and we ended up trying to do that on stage for the next tour and it was really ridiculous cos we’d always be going too fast and have to slow down for the chackahckahchacka…

The “monkey chant,” also known as “Kecak,” is a form of Balinese dance and drama. From the official Indonesian tourism website:

The Kecak Dance is an especially unique and possibly the most dramatic of all Balinese dances. A combination of dance and drama, the Kecak dance depicts the Hindu epic, “Ramayana,” that tells the story of Prince Rama, who with the help of the monkey-like Vanara defeats the evil King Ravana to rescue his Princess Sita. Kecak also has roots in Sanghyang, a sacred ritual based on the idea that during the performance, hyangs, or spiritual entities will enter and possess the bodies of the dancers.

Unlike other Balinese dances, the Kecak is not performed to the accompaniment of Gamelan, which is the Balinese “orchestra.” Instead it is enacted to the sounds of 150 or more male voices chanting “chak-achak-achak,” hence giving the dance its name.

You can hear the sample begin track at the 2:31 mark of the song, panning from right to left. It’s expertly placed, following the mock-triumphant bridge in which Mothersbaugh declares “God made man, but he used the monkey to do it/Apes in the plan, we’re all here to prove it/I can walk like an ape, talk like an ape/I can do what a monkey can do/God made man/but a monkey supplied the glue.” Enter then a field recording of men actually talking like apes (or monkey people) in a chant before Devo returns to a chant of their own, the now-classic “Are we not men? We are DEVO!” In other words, from monkey to man, then back again - the theory of devolution expressed in both words and wordlessness.

Curiously, while Kecak has traditional Balinese roots, it was in fact formed into a full-fledged drama by a Westerner. Again, from Wonderful Indonesia:

In the 1930’s, the German painter and musician Walter Spies took a deep interest in the ritual while he was living in Bali. He then worked together with Balinese dancer Wayan Limbak to recreate it into a drama, combining themes and movements from the traditional Sanghyang exorcism rituals with portions of the Hindu epic, Ramayana. The intention was to create a dance that was both authentic to Balinese traditions, yet appealing to a Western audience.

Wikipedia adds, from more credible sources:

This is an example of what James Clifford describes as part of the “modern art-culture system”^[3] in which, “the West or the central power adopts, transforms, and consumes non-Western or peripheral cultural elements, while making ‘art,’ which was once embedded in the culture as a whole, into a separate entity.”^[4]

This kind of cultural transaction could not have been unfamiliar to Eno, an early progenitor of what unfortunately came to be known as “world music” (see his 1981 collaboration with David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts). Really, the inclusion of the “monkey chant” on “Jocko Homo” was a case of history repeating itself, culturally - the borrowing of a non-Western art form that had in fact, already been transformed by a  Westerner. Eno is one of popular music’s most notorious intellectuals - but how much of this was he aware of when he synced the tape loop to Devo’s factory belt beat? Was it really just a case of the word “monkey” setting him off, as Mothersbaugh said? And how did I miss this sound for the last 10+ years?

And what was the call-and-response I heard at the Fox Theater? It was this:

I got a rhyme that comes in a riddle!

O-HI-O!

What’s round on the ends, high in the middle?

O-HI-O!