I never really thought of it in those terms before, but I think I hear what you’re saying. Jagger’s delivery in the Stones’ original has always been tinged with haughtiness, where the man who can’t be a man because he doesn’t smoke the same brand of cigarettes as Mick is dismissed as a pesky annoyance, which makes his lack of satisfaction come across more as a symptom of frustrated entitlement than, I don’t know, some kind of heartfelt disappointment. When you hear Devo’s cover on the album, as slick as it is, there’s a chance it might just be an elaborate send up: “Oh yeah, sexual dynamo Mick Jagger isn’t satisfied. And get a load of these lyrics!” But this version, with the sharpness of the off-beat snare and the hollowness of sound on the verses, Mark Mothersbaugh starts to enter the same realm of David Byrne’s narrator on “Psycho Killer,” so tormented by these rigid and neurotic rules for living that when he encounters a man who doesn’t smoke the same brand of cigarettes and therefore cannot be a man, it registers as a fatal Does Not Compute error.
Such a perfect description of the Devo version of “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction”. Long live the disaffected, alienated feeling of post-punk.
