“Girl U Want” by Devo

"Girl U Want" opened the account for Freedom of Choice, Devo's third studio album, arriving on Warner Bros. in 1980 as the record's first single. Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh wrote it, Devo produced it themselves with Robert Margouleff as associate producer, and the band had already been playing it live, in much the same arrangement, since December 1979.

The story goes that the Knack's "My Sharona" set it off, a claim Casale, the band's bassist, has flatly denied. Either way it is Devo at their most wound-up: a jerky, clipped riff, a beat that marches in lockstep, and a song about wanting a woman who will never want you back, delivered with the band's trademark deadpan leer. Lust as a factory malfunction.

The video is a gem of mock-vintage television. Devo play to a crowd of swooning young women in the manner of an Ed Sullivan Show spot, flanked by two robot backup dancers, one male and one female, wearing the silver naugahyde suits from the album cover and miming on Moog Liberation synthesizers. The colour was tampered with so that the red energy dome hats come out nearly purple. It came after "Secret Agent Man" and ahead of "Whip It" in the singles run.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.