Smooth Noodle Maps, released in 1990

1990 in music

This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1990.-Events:*January 21 – MTV's Unplugged premieres on cable television with British band Squeeze...

, is the eighth studio album by American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 New Wave

New Wave music

New Wave is a subgenre of :rock music that emerged in the mid to late 1970s alongside punk rock. The term at first generally was synonymous with punk rock before being considered a genre in its own right that incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960s...

 band Devo

Devo

Devo is an American band formed in 1973 consisting of members from Kent and Akron, Ohio. The classic line-up of the band includes two sets of brothers, the Mothersbaughs and the Casales . The band had a #14 Billboard chart hit in 1980 with the single "Whip It", and has maintained a cult...

.

The album includes a cover

Cover version

In popular music, a cover version or cover song, or simply cover, is a new performance or recording of a contemporary or previously recorded, commercially released song or popular song...

 of the early 1960s song "(Walk Me Out in the) Morning Dew

Morning Dew

"Morning Dew", also known as " Morning Dew", is a post-apocalyptic folk-rock song written by Canadian singer Bonnie Dobson in 1962.According to Dobson in a 1993 interview, "Morning Dew" was inspired by the film On the Beach....

," typically "mutated" into a New Wave dance song.

Until the release of 2010's Something for Everybody

Something for Everybody (Devo album)

Something for Everybody is the ninth studio album by American New Wave band Devo. The album was released on June 15, 2010, after previously being slated for release in May 2010, having been pushed back from its original release date of late 2009 due to "radical remixing." Something for Everybody...

, Smooth Noodle Maps was Devo's last full-length studio album available.

The front cover of the record (and the fold-out of the CD version) featured the members of the band emerging from a strange circle. The liner notes from the "Post Post-Modern Man" single revealed that circle is actually a computer simulation of the planet Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...

. This image of Jupiter was provided by Philip S. Marcus and Nicholas Socci. The album title refers to a kind of discrete mathematical system—a noodle map—which may exhibit chaotic behavior, similar to the standard map. The adjective smooth

Smooth function

In mathematical analysis, a differentiability class is a classification of functions according to the properties of their derivatives. Higher order differentiability classes correspond to the existence of more derivatives. Functions that have derivatives of all orders are called smooth.Most of...

 refers to the lack of kinks or discontinuities. Related to this, the
lyrics to Devo Has Feelings Too include the line snake through the chaos with a smooth noodle map.

Track listing

All songs written by Mark Mothersbaugh

Mark Mothersbaugh

Mark Allen Mothersbaugh is an American musician, composer, singer and painter. He is the co-founder of the new wave band Devo and has been its lead singer since 1972. His other musical projects include work for television series, films, and video games....

/Gerald V. Casale unless otherwise indicated.

1. "Stuck in a Loop" (3:52)
2. "Post Post-Modern Man" (2:55)
3. "When We Do It" (2:57)
4. "Spin the Wheel" (3:46)
5. "Morning Dew
   Morning Dew
   "Morning Dew", also known as " Morning Dew", is a post-apocalyptic folk-rock song written by Canadian singer Bonnie Dobson in 1962.According to Dobson in a 1993 interview, "Morning Dew" was inspired by the film On the Beach....
   
   " (Bonnie Dobson
   Bonnie Dobson
   Bonnie Dobson is a Canadian folk music songwriter, singer, and guitarist, most known in the 1960s for composing the songs "I'm Your Woman" and "Morning Dew"...
   
   /Tim Rose
   Tim Rose
   Timothy Alan Patrick Rose , best known professionally as Tim Rose, was an American singer-songwriter, who spent much of his life in London, England and had more success in Europe than in his native country...
   
   ) (3:01)
6. "A Change Is Gonna Cum" (3:10)
7. "The Big Picture" (2:45)
8. "Pink Jazz Trancers" (3:13)
9. "Jimmy" (2:51)
10. "Devo Has Feelings Too" (2:40)
11. "Dawghaus" (3:23)

• In 1994, Restless Records
  Restless Records
  Restless Records was started in El Segundo, California in 1981 by Enigma Records and primarly released alternative, metal and punk records. Restless also licensed and released records from Bar/None Records, Metal Blade Records and Mute Records...
  
  reissued the album on CD with the following bonus tracks:

1. "Post Post-Modern Man (Macro Post Modern Mix)" (3:21)
2. "Post Post-Modern Man (Neo Post Modern Mix)" (6:43)
3. "Post Post-Modern Man (Ultra Post Modern Mix)" (6:14)