Synopsis

Devo perform "Beautiful World" while Booji Boy watches a stream of seemingly perfect images: attractive people, consumer products, futuristic technology, and postcard-like Americana. As the song progresses, the cheerful imagery gives way to scenes of violence, social unrest, war, famine, car crashes, and nuclear destruction. The video's deliberately jarring contrast exposes the song's central irony: the world may look beautiful from a privileged distance, but its benefits are not shared equally. Booji Boy's presence turns the presentation into a grotesque parody of television entertainment and cultural optimism.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was released in 1981 to promote the album "New Traditionalists."

• Its visual concept is built largely around archival and found footage, rather than a conventional performance narrative. This approach allowed Devo to turn familiar images of American prosperity into evidence of cultural contradiction.

• Booji Boy, the grotesque infant character associated with Devo's mythology, appears prominently and functions as an unsettling viewer surrogate.

• The upbeat arrangement and smiling presentation were intentionally played against images of race riots, the Ku Klux Klan, World War I, famine, automobile accidents, and nuclear explosions.

• The video's irony was not always understood by advertisers. A re-recorded version of "Beautiful World" was later used in a Target commercial, despite the song and video being conceived as a critique of consumer culture and Western civilization.

• The clip was included on "We're All Devo," the band's compilation of music videos released in 1983.