It is tremendously vindicating for a diehard Year Zero fan that this Nine Inch Noize record has more Year Zero songs on it than from any other era of Nine Inch Nails' discography. Not only that, but arguably the best songs on this record are the Year Zero tracks. And not only that but these versions of these songs are quite possibly better than the originals in some ways.

I was lucky enough to get to see Nine Inch Nails perform just a month or so ago, and it was great to get to hear this version of Vessel played live. All in all, it's a great time to still be a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor is still firing on all cylinders and seems to manage to avoid fucking up NIN's legacy. I wish I had been at Coachella, but only if all the other people weren't there.

I'm three years late or more to this song, likely thanks to the fact that I didn't really use TikTok until it was banned-not-banned in the USA. But now that I do use TikTok, I know about this song, thanks to Unbotheredkev, an older gentleman who looks an awful lot like Dustin Hoffman in I Heart Huckabees, whose got a habit of flipping off the camera and doing a little dance to this song. I dig it, I like it, the vibe is right.

This song is a "movie band" song, like The Venus in Furs from Velvet Goldmine, which means this isn't a real band and they haven't got any other songs. Even after 3 years of this song being known as a "TikTok song" and countless people declaring that it is "so tuff", there is no other music. It just makes you want to cry. I guess I'll have to watch this movie.

Or, maybe I won't, and I'll just listen to this song on repeat for 3 hours instead. Could the movie really be as good as that? Only one way to find out... or live in blissful ignorance my whole life. I guess we'll see. Well, you won't, because there's no other song from this movie, so I won't be mentioning it again here.

This is definitely my favorite Devo song. Admittedly, I haven't been a true Devo fan for very long, only since I first saw them live at Cruel World in 2022. Seeing all those old guys on stage looking like the coolest fuckin' guys I've ever seen in my life, well, it changed my life. I started devouring every Devo album, even the bad ones. I saw them live again at Darker Waves 2023, and then later that year in November for one of their "farewell tour" shows. Both those last performances I was flying solo, a scrawny old maniac dancing alone amidst a sea of older people who seemed to have forgotten that Devo is dance music.

Not only is the music for this song quite possibly the strongest ear worm Devo ever synthesized, but the lyrics are just glorious. They are reportedly based on a series of threatening letters sent to a game show host by someone calling themselves Cowboy Kim, which you can view at that link.

That said, the best part of the lyrics don't seem to come from those letters, the chorus: "I'm a man with a mission, a boy with a gun. I got a picture in my pocket of the lucky one, who doesn't know I'm a big mess." I don't think it's a coincidence this song is on the same album with "I Desire", with its lyrics from a poem by John Hinkley, Jr., and "Peek-a-boo", arguably the scariest DEVO song. I think we could call Oh No It's Devo "the stalker album". Definite shades of Peter Gabriel's "Family Snapshot" to be found here.

This is another DEVO cover, of the most excellent song "Pity You", which had to be covered under a different song name for record label related legal reasons. "Pity You" is right up there in the greatest DEVO songs pantheon, at least my pantheon, and this cover might actually improve it in several ways–which is probably easy because it's all five members of DEVO playing the song. This is like "DEVO with Toni Basil", and it fucking rules so hard.

It's also accompanied by this fever dream of a music video that is probably one of my most favorite archival pieces of 80's film I've ever seen. Everything about this is so excellent, from beginning to end, just insane. To be paired with such a great song, ugh, it's not fair.

What's also not fair, for Toni Basil, is that she only did four DEVO songs. (The other two on this album are "Be Stiff" and "Space Girls", both very good as well; later there's the DEVO song "The Only One" with Basil fronting, too.) Gerald Casale semi-co-produced her self-titled album later and, sadly, it's no good (aside from Mickey, of course); and the non-DEVO songs on this album aren't any good either. Sorry, Toni, if you're reading this, I desperately wanted to like your albums, but they're just not for me. Those three DEVO songs, good lord, it's actually proof I don't live in a simulation crafted just for me, that there isn't a full album or two of Toni Basil fronted DEVO songs.