The torch has been passed to a new generation...

At a time when pop music seems to have long ago run out of ideas - when pop music as a category, in fact, seems extinct - comes news which brings me the kind of frisson I haven't felt for twenty years. Devo have done a deal with Disney (sounds like a line from The Court Jester) to create Dev2.0, a kiddie cover band reprising the Devo back catalogue.

The beauty of pop (but also, perhaps, its ultimate limitation) is that it can contain every conceivable gesture without contradiction. It is the Whitmanesque 'multitude'. Dev2.0, which should look like a nauseating sell-out (think Muppet Babies, for example) comes across as a perfectly logical extension of the Devo worldview.

In the repertoire of poses available to dinosaur-rock (and dinosaur post-punk of every kind), the most laughable has always been the pose of the band as a Promethean brotherhood, bringing empowerment from on high to The Kids. Classic example: Pink Floyd's The Wall. Modern example: Green Day. But I recall the video for Devo's Through being cool: Devo are a kind of quatermaster's corps, issuing prop rayguns to young teens, who take them onto the streets to disintegrate numerous examples of daggy, mediocre middle-aged bad taste (joggers in velour tracksuits, etc.) When Pink Floyd do it for real, it's funny; when Devo do it as a joke, it feels real. Now it is real.