Devo’s ‘Whip It’ So Loud, Woman Didn’t Know She Was Being Burgled

When Ronnie James Dio sang of “TV Crimes” on the Black Sabbath album Dehumanizer, this is the kind of thing he might have been thinking about.

Cops in Columbus, Ohio, released a video of a TV being stolen from a women’s apartment, noting that she had been listening to Devo’s 1980 classic “Whip It” so loudly that she hadn’t realized her home was being raided.

“On April 29, 2018, at 1:40PM, two black males entered an unlocked apartment on Wilkes Court at Ashton Pines Apartments & Townhomes in the Hilltop,” Columbus Division of Police said in a Facebook post. “While the victim was upstairs, the thieves stole her TV from her family room.”

You can watch the moment below.

“We didn't like [‘Whip It’] any better or any less than any of the other songs we were doing, and we had no idea it would become a hit," Devo co-founded Jerry Casale once said in an interview with Songfacts. "Cal Redmon, who was a big radio programmer in the Southeast out of Florida … he latched onto that song off the Freedom of Choice album and started playing it on some stations down there. … It spread around the country. All the DJs and people hearing it assumed it was a song about beating off or sadomasochism, so we let them think that. We didn't want to ruin it and tell them the truth, because they just wouldn't get off on the truth.”

The truth? Casale said the song, which reached No. 14 and was the band's only Top 40 showing, was "written by me as an imitation of Thomas Pynchon's parodies in his book Gravity's Rainbow. He had parodied limericks and poems of kind of all-American, obsessive, cult of personality ideas like Horatio Alger and ‘You're #1, there's nobody else like you’ kind of poems that were very funny and very clever. I thought I'd like to do one like Thomas Pinchon, so I wrote down ‘Whip It’ one night. ... Although we weren't trying, it was a pretty concentrated dose of Devo in 'Whip It.'"