A creative mind can find artistic inspiration in the darnedest places. Marcel Duchamp's revolutionary work of anti-art, "Fountain," was just a porcelain urinal rotated 90 degrees. And Frank Zappa found musicality in running a violin bow across a bicycle wheel and wrote instrumentally complex songs about dental floss and yellow snow. And the band Devo, known for whipping it good and wearing energy dome hats, formed in response to the Kent State shooting.
The shooting lasted just 13 seconds, according to History. Students at Kent State University in Ohio had been waging antiwar protests for days after President Nixon — who had largely won his White House bid with a dishonest promise to dial down U.S involvement in the Vietnam War — revealed that he unlawfully expanded the conflict into Cambodia. On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen deployed to the Kent State campus opened fire, killing four students. Among them were Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, both of whom were friends of Devo cofounder Gerald Casale.
At the time Casale was an art student who had a rather bleak perception of society, per Vice. He had already jokingly coined the term "devolution" and its abbreviated form "devo" to describe what he considered America's backward path. However, the Kent State shooting created a sense of urgency. So Casale and four other people formed Devo, which adopted Dadaist absurdity "and other Interwar art movements to create bizarro, disconcerting," and subversive depictions of society.
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