Songfacts®:

• One of the earliest Devo songs, "Uncontrollable Urge" was written by their keyboard player Mark Mothersbaugh, who sings lead on the track. Many Devo songs have subversive deeper meanings; "Whip It," for instance, is a sly look at American politics from the perspective of the rest of the world. "Uncontrollable Urge," though, is really just about a guy struggling to keep his unbridled enthusiasm under control. "It was just about energy," Mothersbaugh told Vulture. "It was just about being young and excitable."
• The song is influenced by The Beatles, falling somewhere between homage and parody. It has the same chord progression as "I Want To Hold Your Hand," and the "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah!" part is a Devo-fied version of the "yeah yeah yeah"s in "She Loves You."
  
  Apparently, John Lennon took notice. According to Mark Mothersbaugh, Lennon saw Devo perform at the New York City hotspot Max's Kansas City in 1977, before they released the song. They played "Uncontrollable Urge" that night, and after the show the band was waiting in their Econoline van when Lennon and Ian Hunter came out of the club stupid drunk.
  
  "John Lennon looked over and he saw me," Mothersbaugh said. "He came over, stuck his head in the window and went, 'yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!' He heard his chords at the beginning of this song, and I turned his 'yeah yeah yeah' into 'yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!' I was the right age to be impressed by The Beatles."
• "Uncontrollable Urge" is the first song on the first Devo album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, released in 1978. The band was a multimedia project that early on focused on films, figuring they could sell them on Laser Disc at some point. They didn't even want a record deal until they realized laser disc wasn't going to work, so they signed with Warners and issued the album. They didn't give up on film, though, and a lot of what they shot was built around their songs - music videos, essentially. When MTV went on the air in 1981, they put "Whip It" in hot rotation and it became one of their most popular videos.
• The ambient music pioneer Brian Eno produced this song along with the rest of the album. That same year, he released an album of music designed to be played at airports called Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Of course, you wouldn't want to play "Uncontrollable Urge" in an airport, but Eno also loved unconventional pop music with a tinge of punk; along with Devo, he was also producing the Talking Heads.
  
  So how did Eno and Devo find each other? Devo formed in Ohio, and when Iggy Pop played a show at The Agora in Cleveland on March 21, 1977, Jerry Casale of Devo got backstage and put their demo tape in a basket Pop used to collect them. Playing keyboards for Iggy at this show was David Bowie, who told Pop to let him know if there was anything good on those tapes. Iggy loved the Devo offering and passed it along to Bowie, which led to a record deal for the band and gigs at Max's Kansas City. Brian Eno agreed to produce the group, and they made the album together in Cologne, Germany.
• We never find out what's uncontrollably urging the guy in this song. According to Mark Mothersbaugh, he had some additional lyrics written for the song but lost them when he accidentally mailed them out with some other materials. Instead of re-writing them, he just left the song as is.
• Devo choreographed robotic movements for when they performed this song, with each member being absolutely still until they need to play.
  
  "The dance to this song evolved by itself in a basement," Mark Mothersbaugh said. "When you have five guys on stage and they all look like waste control workers, we would go into organized movements. We couldn't really dance, but it was effective at what we could do – be stiff."
• "Uncontrollable Urge" is the theme song to the long-running MTV series Ridiculousness, which launched in 2011. The show is made up of videos posted on the web, with host Rob Dyrdek offering commentary. It's cheap and easy to produce, so the network made lots of episodes and runs them often. An irony is that after "Whip It" became so popular when the network launched, MTV pretty much ignored Devo.
  
  The band never made much money until the late '90s when their songs started showing up in commercials. In every case, they re-recorded the song so they could keep the performance royalties and customize it for the client. This is what they did with Ridiculousness, re-recording it with Dyrdek doing the "yeah!" vocals. The entire band (and presumably, Dyrdek) get paid for the performance every time it airs, but Mark Mothersbaugh gets the publishing royalties because he's the only credited writer on the song. In 2025 his manager/wife Anita Greenspan told Rolling Stone he makes about $1 million a year from it. Mothersbaugh also wrote the theme to the kids' series Rugrats and has written music for Yo Gabba Gabba!, What We Do in the Shadows and many other shows.
• There's something strangely apropos of a Devo song providing the theme to Ridiculousness, a look at unfiltered (mostly) American idiocy. Devo formed at Kent State University in the early 1970s following the 1970 killing of four unarmed students by the National Guard. The band's philosophy of "de-evolution" was triggered by this event. They were essentially performance art, at times being intentionally stupid and mindlessly impulsive as a kind of analog for American politics.
  
  "It was like combining film making and theatrics and cutting-edge kind of synthesizers and rock beats all rolled into one big performance with a lifestyle message behind it, which was basically to beware of illegitimate authority and think for yourself," Jerry Casale told Songfacts. "Hardly a revolutionary idea, but it turns out to be more revolutionary as people's freedoms are slowly eaten away."
• Devo played this song at SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, held in 2025 at Radio City Music Hall, with Fred Armisen on drums. They were the only band on the bill that had been around longer than Saturday Night Live, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary.