Now it can be told: Thirty years after the fact, Jerry Casale of Devo explains that one of the band’s greatest songs, “Whip It,” came from his reading. “I had these ‘Whip It’ lyrics from my attempt at doing a Thomas Pynchon parody,” he explains in an interview with Flavorwire. The song was also “a parody of the whole Horatio Alger ‘You’re number one, there’s nobody else like you, you can do it’ thing.”