December 12, 1980 –
Whip It earned Devo a gold record on this date. It is the first distinction of its kind for any song about masturbation to earn a gold record. Well, whip it good!
When MTV launched in 1981, they had very few videos to choose from. Some European and Australian artists had been making videos, but very few came from US artists, and most of those were concert videos. Devo had been making interesting videos for a while because they thought Laser Discs were going to catch on and wanted to make film shorts with music soundtracks that people could watch on them. Laser Discs never caught on, but MTV did, which gave this video lots of exposure.
The Haus of Dcaligari 