A 1970s musical trend we're glad to have seen die

In a world where we've been overwhelmed with faggy bands playing lame shit, Justin Bieber, and that annoying thing where a girl sings a love song and a dirty rapper interrupts to talk about being a thug (which I promise to cover soon), there is at the very least one music trend that disappeared in the 1980s and hasn't been seen since.

I'm talking here about the shitty shitty shitty musical sequel.

This was a big thing, particularly in country music, in the 70s and 80s. I'm going to give you the two worst examples here:


You know this one. You were singing along. You know it. It's, of course, CW McCall's Convoy. But you might never do this again after you hear the completely horrible followup called Around the world with the Rubber Duck:


I can't put accurately into words everything wrong this song because my fingers would fall off. First, when did truckers think they were pirates? Why do southern American country guys think they can pull off British accents? The European tour thing just boggles my mind, and then add in bizarrely over-the-top religiosity and a musical score that has please beat me up in Alabama written all over it. It's just bad. Brutally bad.

And then it gets worse. Dust off your fiddle, rosin up your bow, and get on down with the legendary right-winger Charlie Daniels and his most kick-ass tune:


If The Devil Went Down to Georgia doesn't make you cry out "fuck you, Satan!" you're probably going to bump into him when you die. And if you do end up sinning enough to wind up in hell, this song will probably play daily:


It starts off promising and familiar...it's like that "gunter glieben glausen globen" at the beginning of Pretty Fly (for a White Guy) and then after its over you find its the lame Def Leppard song instead. The first problem, of course, is that Charlie Daniels himself isn't even singing the damn song: yes yes, they got Johnny Cash, but you can tell his heart is totally not in it. One of the reasons might be that the edge in the original is totally lacking here: the Devil forces Johnny to play with his old fiddle? I don't get it. Johnny already beat the devil with that very same fiddle. It would be as if the day after Seattle won the Superbowl they signed both LeSean McCoy and Adrian Peterson (signed, no trades), and then 3 days after that the Denver Broncos challenged them to a Superbowl rematch...with the catch that the two new star players couldn't be in the lineup, and instead they merely had to field the team....that had already won. Yes, it's possible that Johnny may lose a rematch, but is the loss of the golden fiddle really such a big deal?

The lyrics themselves are actually pretty awful. For one thing, they're tame as all get out. I talked about the weak music in the Convoy sequel, but here the lyrics lose all the dramatic tone of the original. Why is Johnny going to the woodshed if the devil is going to hell? Does he mean he's going to take the devil to the woodshed? You can't do that if he leaves, Johnny. And aren't you supposed to be practicing anyways? And why do you need to practice, exactly? Isn't the whole point to the song that you're better than the devil? Has he been busy practicing? What's the message to this song? The original was that if the devil wants to find a soul, he'd better not try to challenge a dude in Georgia to a fiddle contest. In this one, the deal is...if you beat the devil in a contest for your soul, you'd better keep practicing your skills for his rematch? Why doesn't the devil just wait until Johnny's like 93 on his deathbed? The lyrics to this version, which avoid even the smallest amount of swearing, just disappoint on every level.

Finally, I notice that the fiddle itself doesn't get nearly the airplay in this version as the original. In fact, most of the beat to the song comes from the drums and the bass guitar.

So there may be a lot of things in modern music to be bothered over. There are a lot of music trends that need to stop. But take heed, the country music sequel seems to have bit the dust.